


Hbi Hr At

by Amber_Serpent



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Auror Harry Potter, Curse Breaker Harry Potter, Curse Breaking, Dark Harry Potter, Egyptology, Gen, Good Theodore Nott, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Independent Harry Potter, M/M, Magically Powerful Harry Potter, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Morally Grey Harry Potter, Not Epilogue Compliant, Powerful Harry Potter, Slight Albus Dumbledore bashing, Slytherin Harry Potter, Study of Ancient Runes (Harry Potter), Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Wards (Harry Potter), Well-Meaning Albus Dumbledore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28119780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber_Serpent/pseuds/Amber_Serpent
Summary: (I'm pretty sure the title means "Travel Through Time" in Middle Egyptian but I know nothing about the language nor the grammar...)Wherein Harry Potter and Theodore Nott are Auror partners three years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and during an investigation of a criminal coven of witches and wizards, are sent back in time to their eleven-year-old bodies by an old Egyptian ritual. They decide to try and save as many people as possible while researching the ritual that sent them back in time and they change things up along the way; starting with Harry being Sorted in Slytherin.
Relationships: Theodore Nott & Harry Potter, Theodore Nott/Harry Potter
Comments: 203
Kudos: 852





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think about the first chapter! I've only read through it a few times and while I don't feel like it's a good first chapter, I thought I'd check out some peoples' opinions first before I rewrote it.
> 
> **12/20/2020 Edit: I've rewritten the first chapter because the previous version of it was just me working out an idea I had and feeling out how people would react to this type of story. Let me know what you think of this chapter and whether or not you think you'll enjoy the direction this story is going and the changes that I've made.**

In a cave somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, there was a sudden swirl of unexplainable wind. Dust and stone particles were blown across the floor, collecting in the centre of what appeared to be a ritual circle set in lead. Lines of mercury and silver swirled and crossed in complex patterns. If one looked hard enough, they could see multiple different Egyptian hieroglyphs represented by the crossings of the metals.

The stone and dust began to swirl and rise into a ball. The wind picked up, spinning and condensing the stone so tightly that it appeared to be sparking light. But no, it wasn’t sparks caused by friction, because light began to shine and flash from the ball, lighting up the cave, revealing dozens of hieroglyphs repeated over and over again around the ritual circle that were also shining with a golden light.

The light in the centre of the cave spun erratically once more before it flickered and died, sending the particles of dust and stone to be thrown back. A thud of bodies making contact with the stone floor replaced the light.

There was a muttered swear and a barely muttered, “ _Lumos_!” said in a boy’s voice.

A ball of bluish-white light flickered above an incredibly skinny and fragile-looking pale hand, bathing the previous lit up the cave in light. The light revealed the hieroglyphs etched into the ground, the ritual circle glinting int he light, and most importantly, two dark-haired boys.

Harry winced from the brightness of his wandless _Lumos_ and toned it down with the ease that only hours of practice with wandless magic could do. Squinting against the light, he took in the cave that he had just been in a few seconds previous and filled with hooded people. Now, it was completely empty save for him and his Auror partner.

Turning to said partner, he froze almost comically as he met the gaze of Theodore Nott. Theo was staring at him with surprised ice blue eyes before he swore. Violently.

Despite the current situation, Harry found his brows rising. It wasn’t often that one caught the usually silent pureblood swearing. Hell, barely anyone outside of Harry even heard him talking more than a few words in a soft voice, and that was only when they had to report to their superiors or talk to witnesses or suspects for their job. Harry had figured that it had been ingrained in Theo since he was a child that such crass language wasn’t appropriate for an heir of a Most Ancient House.

When Theo finished swearing, Harry pulled himself to his feet and sent his hovering ball of light into the air so that they could see better. He abruptly realized that he was several feet shorter than normal, and after a glance at Theo—who looked exactly as he did in the vague, early memories of Harry’s life at Hogwarts—he realized that he must have been de-aged, too.

“We’re children,” Harry stated after a few moments before turning his eyes to the hieroglyphics etched carefully into the stone floor.

“That much is obvious,” Theo stated in that quiet, blunt voice of his as he, too, picked himself off the ground. He stumbled slightly, not used to his now lower sense of gravity, before regaining his balance. His shrewd eyes flickered around the ritual circle as he very carefully made his way out of the ring as if afraid that it would come back to life and do something to them again, but Harry could feel that there was only an echo of latent magic that proceeded a completed ritual. The circle wouldn’t activate again unless someone said the incantation to bring it to life and there were none of those linen Egyptian-style cloaked people to be seen. Not even their lingering magic, which Harry searched for with a spell he learned in the Auror Academy, was anywhere to be found.

Harry, after sharing his findings—or lack thereof—with Theo, recalled the ritual they unwillingly partook in as he looked at the hieroglyphics on the ground. They were Egyptian, that much he recognized from his studies into various Egyptian spells and rituals. The long incantation that the cloaked wizards had spoken hadn’t been in Latin, Greek, or Middle English—the languages Harry had studied thoroughly for his spellcrafting and wardcrafting hobby—but Egyptian (whether it Archaic, Old, Middle, Late, Demotic, or Coptic Egyptian was a completely different matter), too.

He recognized some of the words in the chant due to the few discussions he’d had with Bill about various wards, curses, and rituals the man had learned about in Egypt before moving back to England, and from the various books he’d read in the Black Library in Grimmauld Place—because that place was kitted out with books of varying subjects, ranging from Muggle hunting to household charms—on the subject and also from his trip to Egypt before he started with the Aurors.

“These hieroglyphs—?” said Theo quietly, glancing at Harry with a quirked brow.

“Egyptian,” confirmed Harry, finding nothing wrong with the quiet way Theo spoke. Theo was a similar quiet to Harry. They didn’t see the reason to fill the quiet with small talk and usually spoke when they wanted or were required to. Though, Theo often used his body to hold a conversation more than Harry did. A simple head nod and raised brow was an easily interpreted question, and a head tilt and quirked lip was a retort or silent but dry remark. When Theo was willing to hold a conversation, though—which happened more and more often as they got comfortable with one another—he did make quite an engaging conversationalist.

It had taken a day or two to get used to Theo’s constant silence and full conversations through body language when they’d first been paired together, but Harry had gotten used to it quickly. He had tried to speak as he usually did to people who wanted to be friendly to him, but he had quickly adapted to Theo’s silence, not daring to tell Theo how to converse or by getting annoyed.

He’d understood.

Harry had always been a quiet child, but he had crawled out of his shell during Hogwarts because he wanted to keep his first friend happy and Ron liked friends who joked and played Exploding Snap and chess with him. He had also been forced out of his silent moments because of Hermione, too. Hermione had always needed Harry to _verbally_ express whether or not he’d done his homework or what he’d thought about this lesson or what he’d gotten on that question on the test.

After the war, however, when Harry had drifted away from Ron and Hermione, he had become silent again. He thought it was nice, but it was a bit lonely with only a barmy house elf and an old, decrepit house for company. Teddy and Andromeda didn’t really count as company no matter how much he loved his godson, he was as awkward around a grieving Andromeda as he was around the similarly grieving Weasleys.

Harry had also been forced out of some of his self-induced silence during Auror training before he and Theo had been paired together.

That had actually been something of a surprise. Gawain Robards, the head of the Auror office, had paired the silent Slytherin with him during their Auror training. Harry had actually been against the assignment at first, but not for what most would think. (Harry had long since learned the difference between Slytherins and Death Eaters, and he had also learned that there was no such thing as just good and bad, and Light and Dark, and that the world was actually in shades of grey, some of which happened to be lighter or darker shades than the others.) In actuality, he had refused to be assigned to Theo because Robards was a suspicious bastard and Theo’s father had been one of the few Death Eaters that hadn’t been killed or caught after the Battle. Robards had wanted Harry to keep an eye on Theo and to see if Theo knew anything about his father.

Eventually, due to Robards’ wheedling and Harry finding himself without a partner after Ron dropped out to join George in the joke shop (just another reason their relationship depleted), Harry had accepted the assignment.

“The incantation?” Theo said after a few moments, breaking Harry out of his thoughts. He shook his head and glanced at Nott’s tilted head.

“Egyptian, too,” Harry said, frowning as he remembered the chants. He hadn’t understood most of the chant as they had been spoken too fast and Harry’s only knowledge of Ancient Egyptian being spoken was from his visits to Egypt and the few words Bill picked up from the older and far more experienced curse-breakers he’d worked with.

Harry’s eyes trailed over a hieroglyph that he happened to recognize and jolted slightly as the chants when through his mind again. “I don’t know much of the spoken language,” Harry volunteered slowly, “but I do recognize the hieroglyphs and the pronunciations for the words ‘travel’, ‘back’, and ‘time’.”

Harry let that sink in for a moment—because it only took a moment for Theo to understand what he’d just said, his partner was sharp as a tack—and waited for his reaction.

Theo’s face blanked slightly before he turned slowly to meet Harry’s eyes. “We were sent back in time,” he stated. It wasn’t a question. He trusted Harry’s intelligence enough for that and his own observations had most likely only backed up Harry’s statements.

“Yes,” Harry said slowly, “I’m pretty sure.” Harry then flicked his wrist because he didn’t have his wand—in fact, he didn’t have any of his Auror or wizarding stuff on him and he was actually wearing Dudley’s cast-offs and a pair of Vernon’s too-big socks, he’d just realized—and said, “ _Tempus_.” This was one of the first spells Harry had created, which he used to tell the time and date, the latter of which Harry thought was particularly useful for this situation.

Numbers and letters hovered above his hand, proclaiming it to be—

_03:01_

_Friday_

_21st June 1991_

Theo frowned as he stared at the blue flames hovering innocently over Harry’s fingertips. (Harry may or may not have made his spell model the effects of the spell that Diary Riddle used when he drew his cleverly thought out anagram because he thought it looked cool.)

“Exactly ten years,” Theo said thoughtfully, “on the Summer Solstice, during the witching hour, and chanted in Ancient Egyptian.”

“Egyptian wizards were well-known for dabbling in time travel,” Harry commented dryly. Theo sent him a look at his poorly-timed humour.

“Have you ever heard of an Egyptian time travel spell or ritual that worked?”

Harry, who had admitted to Theo a few months ago during their conversation about time travel that he had spent the few months after the battle at Hogwarts searching for a way to travel back in time, shook his head. His search for time travel spells or rituals strong enough to bring a person’s mind or memories this far back in time had actually been the reason he’d gotten into spellcrafting, wardcrafting, and curse-breaking.

He had actually visited Egypt for a few weeks, searched the magical portion of the Great Library of Alexandria that Tom Riddle had studied in decades earlier, and had even weaselled his way into a study of one of the tombs Bill had told him about that had mentioned time travel and Necromancy. It had been an interesting and educational trip that jump-started his three new hobbies (and while Necromancy fascinated him in some twisted sort of way, no way in hell was he about to touch black magic with a ten-foot levitating pole, and probably not even that), but it hadn’t yielded any useful results for his time travel search.

That was probably why he was currently feeling more than a little miffed. He had spent months of search for a way back and suddenly the coven of witches and wizards they were tasked with tracking down not only had a ritual to send people back in time, but _they had actually managed to send them back in time_.

Theo sighed silently and then said, “Well have to research this.”

Harry merely nodded, not bothering to reply verbally. It was apparent where his thoughts had gone. While Harry hadn’t done an in-depth search on time travel since he’d left Alexandria, he had browsed the Black library shelves (and even the bookshops down Knockturn) when the thought struck his fancy. He hadn’t had any headway with any of those, either, much to his despair and frustration.

The thought of going back in time, to prevent Voldemort from rising a second time and to stop so many people from dying, had often lingered back in his mind; plaguing him through nightmares after a particularly gruelling session at the Academy or after a rough case involving the death of someone’s loved one. It was particularly painful when those cases involved newly orphaned children or children with one less parent.

Now that they’d stumbled upon this, it was going to take them _years_ to figure this out.

“I know,” said Harry, closing his eyes. Theo kept silent. He had to know how difficult this was for Harry. He had finally gotten what he had wanted, to go back in time to before all of the bad stuff happened, but they still had to see if this ritual was permanent, what it did to them, what it _could_ do, and potentially, how to reverse it.

Harry scrubbed at his face tiredly, not bothering with the mask he usually wore in public or on duty since it was just the two of them and there was no longer a cult of witches and wizards that they were tracking down—not yet, at least. They wouldn’t show up until ten years in the future, now, and they'd be ready for them if they wanted to become Aurors again. Maybe they'd take up investigating it themselves if only so they could see what kind of information they had. Harry hadn't been the only one interested in those few scrolls they'd recovered from one of the groups' ritual sites.

“Let’s just—go back to our houses—” Harry stopped talking immediately and his eyes snapped open as a thought suddenly occurred to him. They had travelled back in time, they were currently eleven-years-old (or about to be, in Harry’s case), and that meant that their current places of residence were not available at the moment and that there were people who would notice if they disappeared. That reminded Harry that he would have to wait a few years if he ever wanted to see Grimmauld Place again (which he had become fond of and he would _definitely_ be preventing Mrs Weasley from throwing out all of the Black stuff if the Weasleys stayed there this time around) and that he currently lived with not only Muggles who were unaware that he knew of magic, but also Muggles who hated him _and_ magic, and had the last name _Dursley_.

Harry swore. Colourfully.

Going back to the Dursleys meant snide comments, yelling, slaps and kicks and punches, little-to-no food, and the cupboard under the stairs—and _fuck_ Harry had only just gotten used to the large master bedroom at Grimmauld because Kreacher wouldn’t let him, the apparent master of the house and the new Lord Black, sleep in a mere guest bedroom.

When he had finally stopped cursing out his hysteria, Theo was staring at him with cool blue eyes. He was standing stiffly on the stone floor—with no socks, and since Harry couldn’t feel a chill through his own threadbare, too-large socks, that meant Theo had had the foresight to cast a warming charm on the ground without his notice—and though his face was set in stone, his jaw had developed a tic and his one cheek was slightly more sunken in than the other which meant that Theo was probably biting his cheek hard enough to draw blood.

This was as close to dropping his mask that Harry had seen in Theo do and Harry wasn’t about to demand that Theo act a little more visibly to make himself feel better. He knew from what little discussion they’d had about their childhood that Theo had been trained to hide his expressions from _everyone_ since he was a young child.

This reminded Harry that he was not the only one who had lived (or were living?) with people who had no qualms causing them pain.

Harry didn’t know much about Theo’s childhood, and Theo didn’t know much about Harry's childhood, but they knew enough. They both knew the signs of abuse (because that was what it was Harry now realized after a couple of helpful—but not to mention _mandatory_ —therapy sessions when he joined the Aurors), and that meant that they could recognize it in others. Harry didn’t know how far Theo’s abuse had gone at the hands of his father (because one of the things Harry learned about Theo’s childhood was that his mother had died and Theo had witnessed it), but he knew it went far enough. He could recognize the scars on Nott’s back because he, too, had those scars.

Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Harry closed his eyes and began a breathing exercise to gain control over his emotions. He forcefully shoved them behind his formidable Occlumency shields (and one thing he would not forgive Snape for was his horrible instruction and _mind-rape_ during his Occlumency lessons) to filter out later.

Harry had learned personally that it was a bad idea to lock your emotions away and not deal with them because you might end up blowing up half of the Auror office with accidental magic. Which was both terrifying (Theo’s description) because only powerful witches or wizards lost control of their magic post their magical maturity, and embarrassing (Harry’s personal thoughts) because he had lost control over a silly comment that he usually ignored.

That poor assistant had been unable to look at him in the eyes since and that had been _two years ago_.

After a long few minutes of meditation, Harry opened his eyes, feeling significantly calmer. Theo was still staring at him, but the clear look in his eyes told Harry that Theo had also taken the previous few minutes to meditate.

“It’s a damn good thing that we’ll be starting Hogwarts in two months,” Harry murmured. “Not that it helps much since that’s still two months with _them_.” Theo hummed in agreement.

“We should… go back to our current residences now,” said Theo reluctantly after a few moments. He nodded to the hovering blue numbers and words that Harry still had hovering in the air despite the tidal wave of hysteria he’d just been through. They’d been in the cave for nearly an hour, making it almost four in the morning. Harry allowed a grimace to cross his face, remembering the early wake-up calls he’d received to cook for the Dursleys like some sort of housemaid, meaning that he’d get at most four hours of sleep and that he’d also have to go _school_.

Harry mentally shuddered at the thought of sitting through numerous boring hours of primary school. But if he remembered correctly, and Harry had always had a good memory but it had gotten startlingly better with Occlumency, then the school would let out in a week or two for the summer hols. Until then, Harry could simply memory charm his teachers to mark him present for roll and charm Dudley to think that he’d been in class.

He smirked to himself then. The urge to screw with Dudley, and his parents too for the matter, was _strong_.

He’d met up with the bastard about two years ago and Dudley had been a complete arse to him. Apparently, he’d forgotten that Harry had once risked his own hide to save his life. And it was such a good thing that the Trace was connected to the wand rather than the wizard, wasn’t it? And that he happened to be quite adept at wandless, nonverbal magic?

Harry’s grin grew.

Objectively, he knew that he should probably not pick on an eleven-year-old since he was mentally twenty-one, but Harry quite frankly _didn’t care_.

He’d lost some of his inhibitions during the war where he’d literally killed, maimed, and _tortured_ people (the memory of Carrow screaming still sent a thrill of satisfaction through him), and then his inhibitions had lowered even further during his dabbles into dark magic. (This had resulted in Harry’s already unstable relationship with Ron and Hermione to shatter to the point where it didn’t hurt him much to think that he’d never be able to reconcile with them and that they were currently eleven and completely oblivious to his knowledge of them.)

It wasn’t just Harry’s interest in the darker magics that drew them apart, either, Harry thought. The three of them had been very different people after the war, and while they had tried to string together their relationship and keep it as it once was, it simply fell apart. Hermione had gone back to Hogwarts to do her NEWTs, Ron had dropped out of the Auror Academy after a few months to help George with the joke shop, and Harry had not only gained his NEWTs, but he had also finished his Auror training months early and very quickly gained the reputation as a brutal and unforgiving Auror who wasn’t afraid to toe the line of dark magic that wasn’t necessarily illegal but also wasn’t completely legal, either.

They were just… too different.

But that didn’t matter now, because if Harry had any say in it, then Hermione wouldn’t be tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange in Malfoy Manor or have to Obliviate her parents for their own safety, and Ron wouldn’t have to know what it was like to lose his brother or fear for his life.

The plans were already running through his mind and Theo clearly saw that if his expression was any clue.

“You’re thinking of changing everything, aren’t you?” he asked anyway.

Harry looked into Theo’s ice blue eyes with his blazing green ones, a fierce smile beginning to crawl across his face.

“And you’re not?” he said simply.

Theo’s answer was a slow, feral grin.

They may not have the same exact goals, but they _would_ be changing the future. If not for the better, then it was for themselves.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came out way darker than I expected and it kind of seems like a filler and the end feels lacking. Please let me know your thoughts about this!

After confirming a time and date to meet and discuss how they were going to handle the past, Harry and Theo Disapparated to their respective… not-homes. Harry appeared in the playground near Privet Drive with barely a sound, an amazing feat considering he was Apparating wandlessly. Most people made a loud cracking sound when they Apparated, and even the older Aurors still made a slight popping sound when they did it. The crack was also typically louder when they did it wandlessly, but Harry, and Theo for that matter, had managed it silently.

Harry stood still for a moment and closed his eyes. His feet were half-buried in a puddle, it was raining, and a heavy wind was messing up his already wild hair.

An odd sense of nostalgia filled him.

It had been nearly five years since he’d last seen Privet Drive and he never once thought that he’d ever be back here again. Still, he could remember much of his childhood here clearly. Almost all of it was bad, mind, but he could still remember it.

He opened his eyes and looked around. He was right next to the swing set where he had once been confronted by Dudley and his gang. Over there was the tunnel he’d once slept in after Vernon had locked him outside. There was the slide that Dudley had once pushed him off, resulting in him having a broken wrist. And over there, in that tree, had been where he often watched the other children play during the summer once he learned that he wasn’t allowed to have any fun.

Harry shook his head to clear the thoughts, uselessly shaking off raindrops as his hair was already sopping wet. He ran a hand through it and absent-mindedly cast a warming charm on himself as he headed down Magnolia Road and then crossed over to Magnolia Crescent. Halfway down the road, he stopped. He stood in front of a narrow alleyway next to a garage. This was the exact same spot that he’d first put eyes on his godfather, though he hadn’t known it at the time.

Something seemed to lodge in Harry’s throat and he blinked back tears. It had been six years since he’d seen Sirius fall through the veil, two days ago had been the anniversary actually, and it almost felt like he was witnessing it again. Harry scrubbed at his eyes uselessly as the rain had already been in the process of washing the tears away. He felt a hysterical laugh bubble out of him.

Sirius was alive! But he was in Azkaban and Harry couldn’t do _anything_ to help him. At least not yet. While Harry wanted to change many events, or at least minimize some of them, he knew he couldn’t change some of them. Pettigrew was currently with the Weasleys, and while Harry could possibly risk his luck by going after Pettigrew, he suddenly remembered that the only reason Sirius had thought of escaping the damn prison in the first place was because he saw Pettigrew in a newsprint. So he couldn’t go after that damn rat yet.

A light above him clicked on and Harry became aware that he was sobbing beneath some random person’s window. He swiftly wiped his tears and skittered away into the shadows. He’d become very good at sneaking around. The Dursleys had been good practice, and so had travelling around Hogwarts under his cloak, but the Academy had perfected his stealth and detection skills.

Turning the corner from Magnolia Crescent to Little Whinging, another memory struck Harry. This time, it was when the Dementor attacked him and Dudley. Harry’s lips curled in a sneer. Half the time, he wished he’d allowed the Dementor to suck out Dudley’s soul, but then he recalled that Dudley had been nothing but a bully and an arse and that he shouldn’t think of killing mere irritants because it was immoral or some such.

He snorted and miserably made his way down Privet Drive. The sky was lightening from black to dark blue and Harry mentally groaned. Why did he have to be sent back in time this early in the morning? It was probably half-past four already and he would have to be up in around three hours.

Discreetly checking his surroundings, Harry stood under the awning of Number 4, Privet Drive’s front door. He did his best to dry his clothes and hair and simply stared at the perfectly brown painted door that matched all of the other bleeding doors in Privet Drive. A sense of… dread filled him. As much as Harry thought about screwing with the Dursleys barely half an hour ago, he knew that if any “freakish” stuff were to happen, that he would be punished.

Oh, he would still fuck with them, but it would be only minutely until after he got his Hogwarts letter and he could intimidate them visibly with magic. Merlin, he would have to wait over a _month_ to get his letter.

Sighing, Harry pressed his hands against his tired eyes and cast _Alohamora_ on the door. It clicked open and he walked in silently, closing and locking it behind him. Harry reluctantly made his way down the hallway and stood in front of his open cupboard.

 _Merlin_ , he thought, _had it always been that small?_

Now that he had looked at the cupboard as an adult (well, a teenager), it was clear how small it really was. The small children’s camping bed barely fit in the cupboard and most of the room was taken up either by his stuff (comprising of Dudley’s cast-offs, his school bag that had a missing strap from when it had been Dudley’s and broke, a few broken crayons, and some army-men missing a limb or head), the three boxes stuffed under the cot filled with what Harry vaguely recalled to be old shoes, and the power box.

Swallowing, Harry reluctantly crawled in the cupboard and closed the door.

It was pitch black, the air was stagnant, and Harry was sure that if he sat up as straightly as he could, that his hair would just brush the stair bottom above him. It made him hunch down so as to make the small room feel larger. If he clenched his eyes shut (though he could see nothing anyway) and imagined, it was almost like he was sitting in his fourposter at Grimmauld.

He let out a slow breath and pulled off his glasses (which had teleported with him to the ritual circle, strangely enough, though he was sure that his younger self would have been asleep at this time and his glasses would have been hanging on a nail coming out of the stair above him) and curled up in his cot. It creaked under him and the blanket he pulled over himself smelt musty and was threadbare.

The silence in the cupboard was absolutely deafening.

Harry scrubbed at his face once more and worked to shove whatever thoughts in his mind away. He would deal with them tomorrow after he ditched school and created a plan.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The silence rang in his ears and the loud snores from his relatives’ rooms were suddenly booming. Harry twisted onto his other side. Five minutes later, he flipped back over. Five minutes after that he stared blankly in the direction of the ceiling.

He couldn’t sleep.

After a few more minutes, Harry breathed out slowly, and employing a tactic that he hadn’t used since he was a child, began to count his fingers and then his toes.

_1, 2, 3, 4, 5…_

_1, 2, 3, 4, 5…_

_1, 2, 3, 4, 5…_

_1, 2, 3, 4, 5..._

Again and again, he did this until his breaths were slow and steady and his eyes felt like weights were pressing on them. Eventually, he fell asleep.

Only to be woken up two hours later by a loud rapping on the flimsy cupboard door beside him.

Harry’s heart raced and he sat up groggily, feeling both wide awake and half-asleep at the same time. His breaths were heavy and he looked around with wide eyes. Enough light peered through the rattling of the cupboard door that he could see the underside of the stairs above him.

“Wake up!” the snappish voice of Petunia said. “Wake up, boy! You need to get the bacon ready!”

Surprisingly loud footsteps for such a skinny woman (Harry had thought once, when he was a teenager and learned about these things from Hermione, that his aunt must be anorexic) echoed down the hall and into the kitchen. Harry sat up on his elbows and breathed in heavily as he tried to calm his suddenly racing heart.

Merlin, it had been ages since he’d awoken this way. Half-panicked for no reason at all. He felt extremely tired, and Harry remembered that he and Theo had been pulling all-nighters in an attempt to catch the coven of witches that had sent them back in time. He hadn’t had a proper rest in about a week and it was clearly affecting his younger body.

Running a hand through his hair, Harry dragged on his glasses (and he grimaced because they were out-of-date and he Merlin he already missed his magically-fixed eyes) and searched around for some clothes. The ones he was wearing had creases and smelled of earth and mud from when he’d walked through the rain. He pulled on a faded black shirt, discreetly shrunk it a size, and pulled on a pair of ripped jeans that he also shrunk and tied to fit with one of Dudley’s old belts that looped twice around his skinny waist. He pulled off Vernon’s muddy socks, sent a quick cleaning spell at them to remove the crusted mud, shrunk them, and then put them back on.

Harry then stumbled out of of the cupboard and had to shield his eyes from the bright yellow floral wallpaper and the shiny orange oak-stained vinyl flooring. He already missed the subdued grey, blue, green, and brown paint walls and dark wood flooring and subtly patterned rugs of Grimmauld Place.

Petunia, the bitch, had already started to make the bacon and Harry mentally grumbled at her. Why the hell couldn’t she just make the damn breakfast if she was so intent on starting it without him? Tired and crabby, Harry stood in front of the stove and waited for Petunia to step away before sending a tripping hex at her. She stumbled in her heels—why the hell was she wearing heels?—against the counter.

As she began to turn to him, Harry put on a concerned expression. “Are you all right, Aunt Petunia?” he asked, blinking at her innocently.

Petunia narrowed her eyes at his blatant kindness, clearly thought about whether or not to answer, before snapping out, “Watch the bacon, boy!” and hobbled away to kick off her heels. Harry dutifully turned back to the bacon to hide a snigger.

Vernon lumbered in just as Harry was adding a second round of bacon to the pan and sat heavily in his chair. Harry had half a mind to send a soft blasting hex at the chair legs to make it collapse below the fat man before deciding that he’s already pushed it a bit by tripping Petunia.

He’ll save that one for later.

Petunia disappeared up the stairs, and some shouting later—“Go ‘way! I don’t wanna get up! I said I don’t wanna get up! I don’t wanna go to school!”—returned with a pissy Dudley. Dudley’s watery piggy eyes turned to him just as he was draining the grease from the pan and he waddled in his direction. Harry seriously considered “accidentally” spilling some of the hot grease on Dudley, before restraining himself. Tripping Petunia or breaking a chair was one thing, but blatantly burning their son would have Petunia shrieking at him and Vernon giving him worse wounds than he could ever do to Dudley.

Instead, he swiftly drained the grease, cast a slight Confoundus on Dudley to make him turn away from him, and began the eggs. Harry snagged a few pieces of bacon and shoved them in his mouth because he had a feeling that Petunia wasn’t going to feed him in petty retaliation for tripping even though she couldn’t confirm that he’d done anything (but when did they ever have to confirm anything?) and he deliberately burnt two slices of toast that was grudgingly given to him. (Petunia, despite being a bitch, had grown up in a less-fortunate area and while she hadn’t starved or lacked for food, Harry knew she couldn’t stand the sight of throwing food away. Though being able to watch her son and husband guzzle down food like it was going out of style was a different matter, apparently.)

It wasn’t a very good breakfast, but to Harry’s shrunken stomach, it was filling enough.

(Harry made a mental note to summon some notes from Vernon’s wallet when he drove Dudley and Harry to school so he could get something for lunch after he sorted through last night’s memories and emotions. It was better that he deal with them immediately instead of risking blowing up and getting severely punished. He may be used to pain but that didn’t mean that he wanted to experience it unnecessarily.)

Harry drank a glass of tap water while his relatives ate their breakfast before retreating to his cupboard for his backpack. He wrinkled his nose at it but pulled the singular strap over his shoulder and waited by the door for Dudley to get dressed and grab his own backpack. Fifteen minutes later, they were rushed to the car by a waddling Vernon.

The trip to Surrey’s primary school was spent with Dudley chattering at his father about this or that and Harry managed to summon Vernon’s wallet, slip out a twenty-pound note, and slip his wallet back in his pocket with everyone none the wiser. As soon as Vernon dropped them off, Harry followed Dudley into the school, proceeded to memory charm his teacher and Dudley to think he was there for the day, before heading to the toilet and Disapparating.

Not a second later, Harry appeared in the playground he appeared in last night. He immediately cast a notice-me-not charm on himself after seeing nobody to Obliviate and headed into the small stretch of woods separating Magnolia Crescent from Primrose Road. He crawled up a comfortable-looking tree, cast a cushioning charm on a thick branch to actually make it comfortable, and settled down after setting up a proximity ward around him.

Harry rifled through his bookbag and pulled out a mostly empty notepad and a pen. He had made sure there was one in it when he’d grabbed his bag so he could write notes as he figured out what to do about the past. Sure, he’d have to discuss some things with Theo (getting rid of the Horcruxes was going to be a _long_ discussion point), but he could still plan out what he wanted to do.

This _had_ been something Harry had been thinking about on and off for the previous four years, after all.

The first thing he did was write as much down as he could remember from his school years, particularly his first year.

Thanks to his mandatory studies in Occlumency, Harry recalled quite a few details from his years in Hogwarts. Most of it was the main events that happened, but if he dug far enough into his mind, he could probably manage to draw up some other details like memorable conversations he’d had (Hermione’s OWL rants came to mind) or different classes (such as the class Professor Flitwick had them practising the _Lumos Solem_ spell and Harry had managed to accidentally blind half of the class before he dispelled the spell).

It took a surprisingly long time—and a few permanent duplication spells—to write all he could remember about the six years he attended Hogwarts. Harry had had to stop multiple times to calm himself down after a few particularly upsetting memories, and surprisingly, fifth year hadn’t been the cause of most of that upset. Yes, he had been tortured by Umbridge (and he had taken _great_ pleasure in arresting the bitch two years ago and telling her that no, he didn’t tell lies when she accused him of making up some charges—and hadn’t her expression been lovely when he lifted up his scarred hand?) and he had seen Sirius die (but Harry had already been having nightmares about that, and it had just helped him sort through some of his emotions from last night/this morning).

It had actually been a great portion of his first, second, and fourth years at Hogwarts that had upset Harry. How he had forgotten how a vast majority of the school—including his own House!—had turned on him and had taken to insulting him, ignoring him, or even hexing him in the halls, he didn’t know. That actually explained why he knew the counters to a few jinxes and hexes that hadn’t been in the school curriculum, now that he thought about it. Originally, he had just brushed his knowledge off when he was going over them in fifth year for the DA (and Harry debated with himself whether or not he should restart the DA, but earlier this time around), putting it up to overhearing someone doing it or being taught them in class, but now he knew.

Harry rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses—and he really needed to find a way to make them more bearable to wear until he could make or buy a vision correction potion—and pushed back his migraine. All of this furious thinking and his tidal waves of emotions had him becoming more crabby than he’d already been. He considered for a moment using a sticking spell to stick him to the branch he was on and napping for a few hours, but decided that he’d suck it up until tonight. If he remembered correctly, then he was usually in his cupboard by eight at night.

Checking the time with a flick of his wrist, Harry gladly began to pack away his stuff. He made sure to stuff his notebook between one of his folders and he put a few spells on them to make sure they couldn’t be read and that they wouldn’t get harmed should Dudley decide to take his bag and toss it in a puddle. It was just going past one and Harry was starving. His stomach may be used to a small amount of food, but that didn’t mean that a small amount of food was enough to keep him going without getting hungry a few hours later.

He dispelled the proximity ward and the spells on the tree before scrambling down the tree. Once his feet hit the ground, he transfigured his clothes into something a little less conspicuous. His jeans shrunk to fit properly, his ratty shoes turned into leather ankle boots, his black shirt turned into a hooded robe, and his belt turned into a black faux-scaled one that fit around his waist.

These clothes were common amongst pre-Hogwarts children in the wizarding world and so Harry wouldn’t look out-of-place when he went to the Leaky Cauldron for Lunch.

Harry also conjured a mirror and used Auror-grade glamours to change his appearance. His scar disappeared, his skin became less sickly pale and instead a healthy tan, and his eyes and hair turned into an unassuming mousy brown. After making sure that he looked semi-decent (he was still gaunt and skinny as a rail, but glamours could only hide so much without being obvious), he Apparated to the Leaky Cauldron.

It was just as Harry remembered it to be before Hannah Abbot took over from her great uncle. Gone was the calming atmosphere of green plants (Neville’s additions) and nice wood-panelled floors and light brown walls, and instead it was replaced with its old look; small and dingy, torches for light, chipped and splintered tables, stained white stucco walls, and Tom the Barman standing at the bar.

Harry stood just to the side of the doorway, taking in the pub with a sense of nostalgia. He remembered the first time he ever stepped foot in this pub on his eleventh birthday with Hagrid. He had been swarmed with people wanting to thank him and touch him. It had overwhelmed him at that time and Harry made a mental note to tell Hagrid that he wasn’t a big fan of crowds. And if that didn’t work, he would hide behind the giant like a shy child with wide, surprised eyes. Hopefully—though he doubted it—that would make everyone back off.

“You all right, son? You lookin’ for somebody?” somebody called out to him.

Harry blinked away the memories—he was doing that a lot lately, he realized—and turned to Tom. “No, sir. My mum told me to get something to eat while she shops,” the lie fell easily off his tongue as he approached the man, “but I’ve only got pounds.” Harry pulled the twenty-pound note he fished from Vernon out of his pocket and held it up for Tom to see.

“No worries, son, we get plenty o’ Muggles through here so I know how to handle the money,” said Tom as he set down the glass he was washing and passed Harry a menu. “What would you like?”

Despite already knowing the menu, Harry took a few moments to read through it. “Could I have, er, some steak and kidney pie with pumpkin juice, please?” Harry asked tentatively, falling into the part of a child easily.

“Comin’ right up,” Tom promised. “Why don’t you go ahead and take a seat right over there?”

Harry thanked the man and took a seat at the small two-person table next to the window facing Charing Cross Road. It wasn’t long until Tom came by with his food and Harry swiftly ate his meal—though he only managed to eat about two-thirds of it—paid, and left for Privet Drive. There were only two hours left until the school let out, so Harry Apparated onto the school roof, Disillusioned himself, and began to filter through his memories.

He began by filtering through the events of him and Theo confronting the witches and wizards who sent them back in time. They had been searching through Knockturn Alley where they had found scrolls with the coven’s emblem on them. Harry had managed to find a trace of magic that depicted an Apparition, and using a spell of his creation, he had found where that person had Apparated to.

As both Harry and Theo were tired, they had decided to forgo informing their superiors of their findings and they had instead decided to get the whole search done once and for all. And so, Harry and Theo had followed the Apparition coordinates—but they had aimed off the side just in case it was a trap—but since the cave was so small, their magic had redirected them into the activated ritual circle.

The witches and wizards had already prepared for the ritual and so all they did was begin the chant which sent them back in time.

This memory Harry made sure to look over again and again and again until every single element of it was ingrained into his mind. He had no doubt that Theo, if he hadn't done it already, would do the same. It was imperative that they glean as much information as possible from their memories so that they could identify the ritual that had sent them back. It may be a blessing to be sent back in time, but Harry really had no idea what the ritual had done to both them and the casters. He didn't know if this was a one-time thing, permanent, used the casters’ lifeforce considering how thick the magic was in the air and the fact that they cut their hands open, or if he and Theo had some sort of time limit for how long they could spend back in time.

Just as Harry was moving on to when he and Theo appeared in this time, the school bell rang. He heard it distantly through the fog of meditation, but he heard it nonetheless. It took him a few moments to fight through the fog and he blinked his eyes open. Looking down, he could see dozens of students making their way to their buses and their respective parents.

Spotting Vernon’s company car, Harry removed the glamours from his body and the transfigurations and most of the shrinking spells on his clothes, hiked his backpack onto his shoulder, Apparated to the ground, and removed his Disillusionment subtly. He didn’t worry about people seeing him appear out of thin air as everyone was focused on leaving the school. It _was_ a weekend, after all.

Harry managed to time his arrival just seconds after Dudley, and though Vernon sent him a suspicious glare, he merely slid into his seat, shut the door, and buckled up. As soon as he stepped through the door, Harry was saddled with chores. He sighed silently to himself but didn’t protest. Most of the cleaning he could do subtly with magic. One of the chores he hadn’t been assigned to was laundry as the Dursleys didn’t trust him with their clothes, so Harry snuck a red sock in with Vernon’s work shirts and left to mop the kitchen floor with the Dursleys none the wiser.

As he had suspected, he was sent back to his cupboard right after dinner. Harry hadn’t tried to sneak any away, simply accepting his small piece of chicken and greens. He had had a rather filling lunch and he really didn’t feel like eating considering the memories he would have to sort through next. After doing the dishes, Harry was sent to his cupboard, which he hesitated going into for just a moment before he shut the door behind him.

Light peered through the slats on his door, just barely illuminating the cupboard, and Harry took off his glasses and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at the inside of his… room. It wasn’t really the small space that bothered Harry, but it was the sickening thought that his _relatives_ had made him sleep in a cupboard for all his life. Oh, Harry knew the original reason why he had been put in the cupboard as a baby, but that didn’t excuse the Dursleys’ excuse to keep him there.

Harry had learned when he mustered up the courage to ask his aunt why he didn’t have a bedroom like the rest of the children at school and instead of a cupboard, that when he was a baby, he had freaked out if he so much as _went_ near the second floor. As a seven-year-old, this hadn’t made any sense, but when Harry had thought back on it after learning the truth of his parents, it had made a sick sensation pool in his belly. This had been right after waking from a nightmare after one of his training sessions with Remus and he had passed out from exposure to dementors. Harry had actually dreamed of the night he witnessed his mother’s murder and the Killing Curse being sent this way.

Harry’s bedroom had been on the second floor.

And instead of realizing that baby, Harry was reacting horribly to being taken upstairs due to _witnessing his mothers’ murder on the second floor_ , his aunt and uncle had shoved him into a boot cupboard under the stairs with nothing but his baby blanket and some old boots.

The memory and righteous fury had Harry’s breath shuddering and he felt his magic lash around him. His plastic toys began to rattle on their shelves and Harry sucked in a deep breath as he tried to gain ahold of his magic. Simply shoving his emotions behind Occlumency barriers wouldn’t help him in this situation because to keep up your Occlumency and to push your emotions away, you actually had to _have control_ over your emotions in the beginning. That initial control over your emotions was what started your progress in clearing your mind and creating mind barriers, and then when you eventually continued the upkeep on your barriers and controlling your emotions, _that’s_ when you could shove your emotions away for later.

This was exactly what Snape had failed to teach and what Harry had failed to understand. He had simply thought that Occlumency was a tool to hide your emotions and thoughts and memories away, but he hadn’t understood to get to that part, you actually had to _continuously control your emotions and clear your mind_. _That’s_ what Snape had meant from “clear your mind.” It was too bad that he had failed to explain that properly despite his admittedly excellent teaching in Defence Against the Dark Arts.

Those memories only made his magic more and Harry struggled to rein in his magic. And quite possibly for the first time in his life, Harry was thankful when his relatives rapped harshly on his door. It knocked him out of his semi-meditative state and the surprise caused his magic to stop lashing at his surroundings.

“What are you doing in there, boy?” Vernon barked, pulling open his door.

“Sorry!” Harry said. “I accidentally bumped into the wall!”

“Well quiet down! Your aunt’s program’s on!”

And Vernon then slammed his cupboard door shut and lumbered away, leaving Harry alone in his cupboard once more.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that it took so long to post this chapter! I was really busy during Christmas week and I couldn't find the time to sit down and write without being bugged by my family, lol. (I'm joking, I love them and I enjoyed spending a few days with company outside my mum and sisters.)
> 
> Then, after Christmas, I pretty much hit a block in my writing. I pretty much rewrote this chapter five times, three times from Harry's pov and twice from Theo's!
> 
> This is the result and I hope you enjoy the story so far! If you've got the time, leave a comment telling me what you like and don't like about this chapter and whether or not you like the plot so far! Also, feel free to ask me questions about the fic and what I plan to do in the future!

“You’re early.”

Harry’s brows were furrowed as he stared down at his notes, the knuckles of his right hand brushing against his lips. His pen, which he'd meant to use to write some additional details, was left forgotten in his left hand and poised against a blank piece of paper. His eyes stared blankly at his ratty notebook, none of the notes he’d meant to read over registering in his mind.

Theo’s words sunk in slowly after a few moments and he blinked a few times, the fog in his mind drifting away. He glanced up at the other boy—and Harry was still wrapping his mind around the fact that they were boys again—who was in the process of lowering the hood to his dark blue cloak and sliding onto the bench across from him.

“I wanted to get an early start,” Harry stated, looking back down at his notes. He frowned slightly and couldn’t remember when he'd begun reading this page. He flipped a few pages back in his notebook to where he could remember reading, his dark green eyes occasionally flicking up to watch as Theo pulled out a few rolls of parchment and a self-inking quill from his expensive yet simple-looking satchel. Harry supposed, what with the unadorned cloak and the relatively plain satchel, that Theo was attempting to appear incognito. He most likely didn't want to risk being recognized by anyone, though Harry didn't know the reason behind it. The cloak was a simpler alternative to Harry fiddling with a glamour and transfiguring his clothes, at any rate. His magic had been acting a little odd this past day or so, which had been obvious from last night’s slip of control. He wondered if Theo had been having the same problems and that’s why he decided to go with a cloak.

Theo’s expression at his statement told Harry that he doubted that he simply wanted an early start. Harry didn’t feel insulted that Theo didn't believe him. He knew that he wasn't the type of person to arrive ridiculously early to something. Don’t get him wrong, he was almost always on time, but he wasn’t the type of person to show up to work an hour or two before he was due to clock-in because he couldn’t sleep in. Usually, if he woke early, he’d read up on a case they had for work or he’d crack open a new book he’d picked up.

Rarely did he show up an hour or two early. That was Theo’s thing. Theo was the type of person who liked to prepare extensively for something and showing up early to work or for a meeting—whether it was to do a case report for work or for a hangout session at the pub—was a part of that; so him saying that Harry was early was saying something. However, Theo respected Harry’s decision to not talk about what was bothering him unless it was affecting their work.

That had only happened a few times, usually when something during a case had upset him, or during either Halloween—when Harry had become increasingly paranoid due to past events—or when the anniversary of someone's death had happened.

Today wasn't Halloween, and the anniversary of Sirius's death had been a few days ago, so the only conclusion Harry knew Theo could come up with was that whatever upset him had to do with coming back in time. And currently, Harry didn’t feel like telling Theo what was wrong—because something _was_ wrong.

He'd been tasked with tackling the garden and mowing the lawn this morning—which he had grudgingly done as he knew any amount of manual labour would be useful to get fit and healthy—and he had decided to take the chance to examine the wards Dumbledore had erected around the Dursleys. From what Harry had recalled, Dumbledore had used Harry's blood to cast the protective magic, but Harry had never had the chance to do an in-depth examination on what type of wards they were or what exactly they did. When he had started getting interested in curse-breaking and ward-crafting, he'd come across a book on blood wards in the Blacks' extensive library in Grimmauld Place that had reminded him of the protective magic that Dumbledore had cast that had required him to return to his relatives each year. However, he hadn’t been curious enough to return to Privet Drive to examine the trace magic that he knew would still be there even years after the wards had fallen.

Now, though, since Harry was stuck in his childhood “home” for the foreseeable future, he had taken the chance to examine the protective magic. The spell cast had been a type of blood ward, Dumbledore hadn’t been lying about that, but he _had_ lied about the fact that they were extremely powerful.

It had only taken a few minutes to locate one of the anchors (which was an alternative to a singular wardstone) and unravel the magic put around the house. The spell Dumbledore had cast with his blood was meant to be powerful, Harry wouldn't deny that, but it turned out that the wards were tied to emotions. And if they weren’t powered by the emotion they were keyed to, they then turned parasitic. Unsurprisingly, the emotion the spell required was love; specifically, the love of one of his blood relatives. And while Number Four had enough of that due to Petunia’s love for her son and husband, there had been no love sent in his direction, which was what the spell had needed in order to be powered.

Due to this, the wards had turned to something else to power them; Harry’s magic.

It was safe to say that Harry's curious mood had immediately plummeted. He'd taken his frustration and anger out on the Dursleys since Dumbledore was currently unavailable through petty revenge. He didn't feel remotely guilty for taking his major frustration from old headmaster on them because he was sure that Dumbledore, at the very least, explained to Petunia how the protective magic around her house would be powered so she was also deserving of it. Or at least he hoped he did. If not, then she was deserving of his pettiness because she made him sleep in a cupboard for the first ten years of his life he'd lived with her.

The springs in the cushion of Vernon's favourite chair had been vanished, making it so that the chair was slightly uncomfortable but not enough to warrant being thrown out. (Harry had also had the foresight to vanish springs on _both_ sides of the cushion just in case Vernon was smart enough to flip it over.) Petunia's favourite shawl had gained a few moth holes in a place that wouldn't be easily or repaired with a mark, making it so that she would have to toss it out or throw it in the back of her closet because it would ruin her perfectly put together image. And Dudley's favourite computer game had taken a trip somewhere he couldn't fit easily; beneath his bed.

Harry shook his head slightly and tried to remove his thoughts from Dumbledore's wards. He hadn't come here to brood, he'd come here to discuss what he and Theo were going to about their first year of school.

"We have a lot to cover," Harry murmured, looking down at his notes. He had a full five pages of his notebook dedicated to the events of first year—and that number only increased as he continued to cover the rest of the years.

"I knew you, Weasley, and Granger got into a lot of trouble," said Theo apprehensively as he eyed Harry's notebook, "but what, exactly, do we need to cover about our first year?"

Harry flipped over to the general outline he made for first year. It had bullet points of various things he needed to address with Theo, just not the details. That's what the five double-sided pages of notes were for. That outline also happened to have the changes Harry planned to make in the future. He frowned slightly and tapped at the table with his pen, his brows creasing as he thought. He wasn't sure how Theo was going to react to some of the significant changes he'd made.

He slid the notebook over to Theo.

Theo's eyes flickered across the page and they got fractionally wider as he continued down the list of events. Clearly, Theo didn't know just what Harry and the rest of the "Golden Trio"—a name Theo once said that most of the Slytherins had created to talk about them—had gotten up to in their first year. He slowly pushed the notebook away and decided to choose a safe topic.

"You want to be put in Slytherin," he commented. "Why?" His eyes were still slightly dazed from the information he'd read (no doubt about the conspiracy of the Philosopher's Stone and the fact that Voldemort had been in the school for a full year), which made his usually eery eyes resemble Ollivander’s omniscient or Luna’s dazed ones. Now _there_ were two people whose eyes properly freaked people out. While Theo’s iridescent eyes simply made you feel as if he was seeing more than you wanted him to see, they didn't make you feel that he could look into your very soul like Ollivander or see things that weren’t there like Luna.

(Harry had, after learning about feeling magic for curse-breaking, tangled with the idea that Luna could either see your magic and therefore your emotions, or she could see… _something_ that had to do with magic. An aura of sorts, perhaps. When they’d hung out before Luna left for an expedition and Harry got too involved into his Auror work, Luna had explained that she saw the world differently than people after her mother's death. Harry hadn't really understood then and he didn't think he'd understand even a decade from now.)

Harry examined Theo’s blank expression, trying to figure out what he was feeling. All he saw were the slight incredulity in his eyes and a faintly confused frown tilting at his lips. Other than that, the rest of Theo’s blank mask remained. This was as close to dropping his mask that Theo did in public and Harry didn’t complain because expressions weren’t the only thing Harry could read on someone. No, after he practised and began to analyze various spells for his hobbies, he had started to become more attuned with the feeling of not only magic in general but also another person’s magic.

Most people’s magic reflected on their mood. It swirled lazily around them when they were content, lashed out when they were angry, buzzed when they were particularly hyper or excited, coiled tightly when they were scared, or became still when they were in shock or surprised.

Magic also reflected on whether or not a person’s magical core was mature or not. A child’s magic was known to fluctuate with their moods, sometimes whipping out sporadically when they did accidental magic. A teenager’s magic was similar, though as that person was near maturation, their magic was stabler, spiking less often. An adult’s magic was usually like a soft wave, only rising when someone was feeling particularly furious or frightened.

As magic was something you could control with a wand or wandlessly, it was also something that you could hide from prying eyes—or magical sensory in this case. Many Aurors, due to their mandatory Occlumency training, tended to have not a tight rein on their magic, exactly, but a sort of leash on it. Other people, though, kept a tight rein on their magic, only allowing it to feel their immediate surroundings. Very few people, however, were talented enough to keep their magic completely locked up, rarely letting it leak out.

Harry was somewhere between the second and last category. He could keep his magic metaphorically locked in a box if he wanted to, but he often felt that his skin became sort of itchy and felt taunt after a while if he did that. It also removed a wide margin of his magic sensory, which he had come used to and felt vulnerable without. And so, he kept most of his magic locked up, but he also allowed a fraction of it out so he could feel out his surroundings.

Theo’s magic was usually locked up tight, but as Harry’s magic sensory had improved, he'd learned that Theo also happened to allow tendrils of magic to feel out his surroundings. That magic was currently creeping out toward him slowly.

All Harry could determine from that was that Theo was merely curious and not even surprised.

Harry tapped his pen to the table and made sure that his silencing wards were still up. Not that he doubted his own ability to hold a simple spell up, but he was feeling paranoid with talking about something so personal. He didn’t have to worry, though, since they were still as strong as when he cast them an hour or two ago. A notice-me-not charm had joined them some time, Theo’s doing Harry easily recognized as he knew what the other boy's magic felt like after years of practice, which he felt was good thinking.

“I don’t think I’m particularly fit for Gryffindor anymore,” Harry murmured, tracing a crack in the table. The Leaky Cauldron sort of had a motto of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and so Tom didn’t bother repairing these types of marks. It sort of leant to the dingy atmosphere and character the pub had, anyway.

“You could easily fit into Ravenclaw,” Theo pointed out, not denying it. That was probably one of the reasons he wasn't surprised Harry wanted to be in Slytherin. “You soak up knowledge like a sponge.”

Which was true, admittedly. Harry may not have really put as much effort into his school work as he should have, but that didn’t mean that everything had gone in one ear and out the other. He had retained a startling amount of information, which had been something he’d realized when he went over his school notes for his NEWTs.

It wasn’t just knowledge in the classes that he took that Harry absorbed, either.

For example, when Harry had moved onto studying time travel rituals when he couldn’t find any spells in that category, he had somehow recognized a few different runes from the rune circles and remembered what they meant from when Hermione ranted at him about some of her Ancient Runes classes. He had also happened to pick up a lot of information from things he’d heard, such as when one of the Order members had made an off-hand comment about some spell that made it easier to identify if something was really a precious metal or jewel or not—which, now that he thought about it, may have been Mundungus Fletcher—which had come in handy when one of Harry’s first cases as an Auror Trainee had been him dealing with a group of wizards only a year or two younger than him making, using, and selling counterfeit Galleons and duplicated jewellery (which didn’t properly retain a real metal or gem’s value).

“I’ve heard things about Slytherin,” said Harry quietly and Theo raised a sardonic brow, making him roll his eyes slightly. “You guys have a sort of… system, don’t you?” he continued. Theo’s eyes widened a fraction as he saw where Harry was going but Harry continued before Theo could say anything. “I could have been in Slytherin, did you know that? I had to argue with the Sorting Hat not to put me there, all because of Malfoy and his big mouth.” Harry may have patched things up with Draco after the war since they interacted sometimes during his job, but he wasn't about to deny the fact that he'd been a brat as a kid.

Harry couldn’t tell whether Theo looked more surprised at his admission—though certainly not the fact itself—or miffed due to either Harry arguing not to be in the Slytherin or because it was Malfoy’s fault that he’d argued not to go into Slytherin in the first place.

“You’re not surprised,” Harry commented.

“Anyone who spends a significant amount of time around you will be able to tell that you belong in Slytherin,” Theo commented dryly. Harry raised a sceptical brow and his partner continued, “You are—or will be—the best Auror in the Auror Department and that was while skipping half a year of training, Potter. _That_ is ambitious. And you’re intelligent, cunning, and resourceful: remember the magical beast black market we busted? Instead of charging in there like a Gryffindor, you used the fact that you're a Parselmouth to get their own snakes to spy on the leaders for us. And let’s not forget to mention the number of favours you’ve wracked up with various people in the Ministry. Don’t think that I hadn’t noticed you doing extra things for Robards or helping a few of the other Aurors with things like paperwork. And while people think you’re well-known for lacking self-preservation, I haven’t seen you take on a group of witches or wizards and get seriously injured; you always walk out with barely a scratch.”

Until it was pointed out to him, Harry hadn't realized just how "Slytherin" he was. Oh, he knew that he was resourceful—you kind of had to be while living with abusive relatives who used food deprivation as a punishment—and he knew that while he hadn’t put as much effort into his school work as he should have, that he had "not a bad mind" to quote the Sorting Hat. He also hadn’t really thought of him doing favours for Robards or others in the Ministry (it wasn't just the Aurors he'd talked to, but people he'd interacted with during the slow days in the office) was him racking up favours, but now that he thought about it, he could remember bringing up things he'd done for others to get them to do stuff for him or to make his life just a bit easier.

But things like being ambition and cunning and self-preservation? Those hadn’t been things he’d been thinking of when he’d thought of being more suited for Slytherin this time around. He had thought of the dip in his moral compass and his studies into darker magics, along with his resourcefulness and intelligence. He'd also thought of using the fact that he was both the Boy-Who-Lived and a Parselmouth to cut back on some prejudice that overruled Slytherin. Taking another look at that idea, Harry had to admit that it was particularly ambitious of him. Perhaps a lot of his traits _were_ Slytherin-prized traits.

“Fair point,” Harry acknowledged. He hadn't realized that Theo knew all of that about him.

Theo huffed out a slight breath through his nose. “What was that about Malfoy?”

“The first two interactions I had with him was of him insulting my first friends,” Harry informed him, shrugging. “I didn’t want to share a dorm with a guy who insulted people without knowing them just because he’d heard a few things about them from prejudiced people. He reminded me of my cousin; a bully.”

For a moment, Theo merely stared at Harry with his usual blank expression on his face for a few moments. “You’re telling me,” he said coolly, “that the reason Slytherin lost out on Harry Potter, the _Boy-Who-Lived_ and a _Parselmouth_ — _and_ _Vanquisher of Voldemort_ —was because Malfoy insulted your _friends_?”

Harry nodded and couldn’t tell whether or not Theo wanted to laugh hysterically or choke out Malfoy even though this younger version of him hadn’t even met Harry yet.

“That's not happening this time," Theo said resolutely before changing the subject, clearly not wanting to think of Malfoy's stupidity in their youth (present? future?), "What do you know about the system we have in Slytherin?”

Harry leaned back and tilted his head slightly at Theo, tapping his pen on the desk as he thought. “Not much,” he said. “You Slytherins tend to keep things ‘in-House’, so to speak, but I’ve… overheard a few teens talking about how things work.” There was a raised brow at this but Harry merely smiled. He wasn’t about to outwardly admit to eavesdropping on preteens.

“You’re all very traditional, though I'm not sure if your families themselves are traditional, or if it's the way the things are done in Slytherin. Many of the students and-or their families see Hogwarts more as a place to gain allies and political power rather than a school since most of the House contains the wealthier population of the school that can afford to hire the best tutors Galleons can buy.

"You also have a… court and leader of sorts? The kids I overheard didn’t really go over it much.”

“That’s a lot more than I thought,” Theo commented idly after a few moments, looking at Harry with something akin to amusement in his eyes, probably at the fact that he'd found all of that out by eavesdropping. "Outsiders rarely know how Slytherin work, so the fact that those kids were talking about it publicly is surprising. The Court doesn't it like it when Outsiders know how Slytherin works, though they make an allowance for those whose parents thought they would be in Slytherin and advised them how to handle us. The Court's liable to punish you—either by humiliation or by shunning you, the latter of which works for the younger years to get the idea—if you betray the common room’s password and allow a non-Slytherin into the common room. "

Harry's eyebrows rose at the seemingly tough punishment but he couldn't exactly say it was too tough. Hadn't the same thing happened to him time and time again when he'd made a perceived error, but instead of the scale on his House, on almost _all_ of the Hogwarts Houses?

"You’re right when you said that Slytherins keep things in-House. It’s actually one of the first rules we learn; appear unified in public but deal with your quarrels in private. There's a reason why you often saw none of the Slytherins go against Malfoy when he started something,” Theo finished.

“And that's because Malfoy’s got a lot of political power due to his father?” said Harry, easily picking up what Theo hadn't outright stated. Theo's lips tilted up in a small, approving smirk.

"Exactly," he confirmed. "Most people, like Malfoy," this, Theo said with distaste, probably because Malfoy had been very annoying during their first time at Hogwarts and had ridden on his father's influence without really forming some of his own, "use their family's or their parents' power to their advantage to rise in the ranks. Some half-bloods simply don't have families that are too influential and Muggleborns don't have _any_ influence unless they were adopted by a significantly powerful witch or wizard or they're secretly a half-blood to an influential family. And unless they were tutored on how things work our world, then they have no hope of properly using their influence. And even if most do significantly well in Hogwarts, both for academics and for having the proper sort of friends or allies, most don't really care about immersing themself in our world. They always cling to the world they came from."

Harry immediately thought of his old dormmate Dean Thomas. Dean had thought, for a majority of his time in the wizarding world, that he had been a Muggleborn. It hadn't been until he'd done an inheritance test in Gringotts that he learned that his absent father, who he thought had left his Muggle mother, had actually been the heir to the Shafiq family who'd disappeared—and most certainly died—during the first war with Voldemort.

This was no doubt the example that Theo was thinking about.

And then Harry thought about the rest of that statement. Theo had said that most Muggleborns didn't care about immersing themselves in the wizarding world and that most clung to their Muggle way of life. That they had no influence in the wizarding world. He had said it with such disdain and it made Harry wonder—was that how most purebloods thought? Did they forsake Muggleborns because they did not know much about the wizarding way of life, of their customs?

Perhaps it wasn't their "dirty blood" after all. Maybe, just maybe, it was because they thought that Muggleborns offered nothing to the wizarding world if they didn't _immerse_ themself in wizarding culture or formed connections.

And the so-called "blood traitors" who accepted Muggleborns? Were they called "blood traitors" not because they didn't support Voldemort's ideals, but because they were willingly accepting witches and wizards who had no intention of sticking to wizarding customs? Accepting those same witches and wizards who often went back to their Muggle roots, ignoring their magical ancestry?

It was certainly something to think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS MERELY THE POST AND THE IMPORTANT COMMENTS FROM THE PREVIOUS AUTHOR'S NOTE I POSTED TWO DAYS AGO. IT CONTAINS MY THOUGHTS ON HOW TO WORK THIS CHAPTER, ALONG WITH WHAT I PLAN TO DO WITH THE FUTURE OF THIS FIC.
> 
> **MY AUTHOR'S NOTE: Help!**
> 
> **Not an update (sorry!) but I'm struggling to make the chapter! I've got about two thousand words of the beginning of the new chapter in both Harry's and Theo's pov and I can't decide which pov to use.**
> 
> **I'm kinda thinking of just using Harry's pov for the whole story since I really want to immerse you in his point-of-view on things without a break in it. I want you (the readers) to discover things about various other characters (Theo, mostly) or even Harry himself as Harry discovers them. So, writing in Theo's pov would kinda counter that as his point-of-view reveals some about his home life and it also reveals the extent of Harry's PTSD, which he isn't aware of.**
> 
> **I know a lot of stories jump povs a lot to get a well-rounded view of things (?) but I don't want to do that. I want some things to remain a mystery.**
> 
> **I'm also struggling to decide whether or not I want to put Harry in Slytherin vs Gryffindor. Most of the notes I've made on the "outlining" of this fic takes Harry being in Slytherin to account, but I'm also kinda liking the idea of writing Harry into Gryffindor. The only thing I'm not liking about that idea is that, for the most part, I wouldn't really get to discover Slytherin politics from Harry's point-of-view. (Though I may fix that since I am considering writing an AU of this AU (?) where Harry's put into Gryffindor, but I'll do that after completing this fic.)**
> 
> **Please leave me a few comments on how you'd prefer the story to go!**
> 
> COMMENTS AND THE GIST OF MY ANSWERS:
> 
> _By BrittneytheOdd: I personally enjoy single POV's the best, you could maybe put Theo's in a one shot and put it in the story's series stuff?_
> 
> _By queenofthefuckinggoblins7: If you're wanting to stick with one view point I think it makes the most sense to stick with Harry's since that's what you started with. Having Harry in Gryffindor could be interesting, I personally adore Slytherin Harry. I'm just excited for anything you write, I love the story so far!!_
> 
> _By harleyrea: Honestly--and I know that this is a bit of a cop out answer--you should do what you want the most. Single pov or switching pov are well and good, but if it makes more sense and appeals to you more to write as a single pov, that's just fine! I saw someone else made the comment, but you can always do a 'snippets' story where you can put other characters pov in, as an optional sort of thing._
> 
> _As for the house, I do love Slytherin Harry stories, but again, it's up to you. I will say, if you've done the outline with Slytherin in mind, it'll be a lot less work for you to keep him in Slytherin, rather than having to rewrite or adjust your plot points later on by making him Gryffindor._
> 
> _Hope I was some kind of help, at least!_
> 
> _By artsy-hoe: i think a single pov would work best and i love slytherin harry. you could always do one shots branching off if you really like the ideas. i’d just write both and see what you like best, publish one as the main story, and the other as a side story. can’t wait to see what you write, though!!_
> 
> Pretty much all of my responses:
> 
> After reading the other comments, I'm planning on keeping it as Slytherin Harry. I've decided to put this fic in a series (even though all seven years will be in this one work) and I'll be adding a work where I add deleted scenes or scenes I wrote to feel out the characters or situations, as well as a chapter that I'll copy and paste from Reddit where I discussed a lot of different ideas for this fic and why I'm writing it like I am. I'm also planning on writing an AU of this fic where Harry's Sorted into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin after I complete this fic.
> 
> I actually really want to write from just Harry's view because, as I said, I really just want everyone to see the story from one point-of-view. I want you guys to discover things as Harry discovers them and I don't want different povs because not only are they kinda difficult to write, but it also defeats the purpose of writing in limited third person.
> 
> Thank you so much for the support!
> 
> LET ME KNOW IF YOU WRITE ANY OF THOSE COMMENTS AND IF YOU WANT ME TO REMOVE THEM FROM THIS NOTE.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of the longest chapters I've written in a while. I hope you enjoy it!

The month leading up to the arrival of Harry's Hogwarts letter was both eventful and busy.

Petunia, as she'd done in the past, had assigned the more labour-intensive chores over to Harry now that school was out for the summer hols. That meant cleaning the house, tidying the garden, washing the car, washing the outside of the house, and mowing the lawn amongst other things. Some of these chores, such as replacing the mulch in the back garden or cleaning up the garage, could be done with magic to make Harry's life a little simpler. It also had the added benefit of helping Harry get his wildly bucking magic back under control.

Both Harry and Theo were having trouble controlling their magic. Harry supposed it was due to the ritual that had sent them back in time, or perhaps the fact that along with their adult conscious, their adult magical cores had also been sent back with them. Theo, knowing more about the intricacies of the theory of magic from his lessons, guessed that their magical cores were too large for their younger bodies, which were only used to a small portion of their magic. That would certainly explain the itchy feeling Harry had, along with the loss of control due to extreme emotions, and the fatigue he had. His body was straining to get used to the magic, and unless he used up a good portion of it or locked it away, it would eat up at his energy.

Luckily, they had both figured out through trial and error that remastering control over their magic was much like the tedious beginnings of Occlumency training where you tried to keep your mental barriers up all the time. It was full of meditation and _practise, practise, practise_.

And so, Harry practised controlling his magic through levitating bags of mulch, digging holes, blasting away piles of dust, and other tedious things. He also allowed more of his magic to leak out into his surroundings; the less magic he had beneath his skin, the less tired he became and the less itchy his skin felt. It also had the added benefit of feeling out his surroundings and his fluctuating emotions became somewhat easier to control, or perhaps a different term would be more accurate. Allowing his magic to creep outside of him made it so that it took longer to upset him since his body wasn't straining to hold so much magic in it.

However, due to the fact that his body was still maturing, that also meant that his magic fluctuated with his moods. So when he tended to get upset—and he tried not to, but it'd happened once or twice—his magic tended to do more damage than it usually did. The first time had happened when he'd had a nightmare—a really horrible one, full of the visions of his family dying, particularly his parents, no doubt spurred on by the fact that Voldemort was alive once again and Harry would be sharing a building (a very big one, mind) with the wraith—and he'd woken up his aunt and uncle.

Vernon had startled him by ripping open his cupboard door and grabbing him, and Harry had lashed out with his magic. He'd ended up having to wipe the memories of all three Dursleys and he spent the rest of the night fiddling with his fickle magic to repair the first floor of the house. Thankfully, none of the neighbours had heard or Harry would have had to _Obliviate_ the whole of Privet Drive. That certainly would have worn down his mood more.

Other than practising his magic, Harry had also begun a sort of exercise and nutrient regimen. He hadn't realized how unhealthy he was the first time around until he'd had a mandatory health check with the rest of his Auror class, and by then, there wasn't much he could do about it. All he could do was take potions to repair the damage to his weak bones and an appetite stimulant to encourage him to eat.

He was now frustratingly weak compared to his adult body, something he didn't like remotely. It made him feel more vulnerable than he really was. His body was scrawny and malnourished and he could already tell the difference between his appetite now than what it had been when he'd become used to eating more often a few weeks ago. He had finally gotten to a normal appetite (though Kreacher had tended to disagree with him) and now he was back to eating scraps like a dog, something that disgustingly made him feel _full_.

It wasn't just his meagre portions, either, that affected him. Any of the yard work he'd done by hand had shown him just out of shape his eleven-year-old self was. He may have done most of the chores around the house, but those compared to the small meals he got didn't give him any muscle.

And so every morning and late afternoon, he'd taken up running around the park or Privet Drive. It was tiring to deal with both his magic and the physical exercise, but he'd already felt a difference after a month, especially paired with the nutrient potions he had been taken. Theo, after Harry had shared a bit about what he was dealing with at his relatives, had been kind enough to make and-or purchase the potions Harry needed until he could gain access to his Gringotts vault. Theo had also offered to owl him food, which Harry had denied.

While Harry knew that it wasn't charity, he didn't like hand-outs nor did he like the feeling of owing people something. Instead, when he did the shopping (another one of his chores), he'd bought the cheapest of whatever was on the shopping list, and he used the rest of the pounds to buy himself healthy foods, which he shrunk and stored in a cooler that he'd charmed to act similarly to a cooling cupboard. He had also used whatever money he could find lying around the house (or what Dudley had stuffed in the back of his sock drawer; his cousin wasn't good with his numbers so a missing ten or twenty wouldn't make much of a difference) to buy himself food, as well.

Perhaps it was immoral, but Harry figured that Dudley owed him after all the times he'd beat him up in the past.

Other than his new exercise regiment, Harry had continued to meet up with Theo at least two or three times a week. They had moved on from going over the vague overview of all seven of their Hogwarts years (Harry's school years had been drastically more eventful than Theo's—unsurprisingly—but Theo had taken up one of their few hour-long meetings going extensively over his third year, which was otherwise called the "Year of Politics" in Slytherin), and they were instead discussing what they were doing for their first two or three years at school.

Harry hadn't expected it to take them so long to go through each year detail by detail, but Theo had insisted on analyzing each event and the possible changes Harry was making by switching over to Slytherin. Personally, Harry hadn't thought that him being Sorted into Slytherin would change much. Quirrellmort (a term Ron had come up with in the past) would still be after the Philosopher's Stone and since Harry wasn't planning on joining the Slytherin Quidditch team, he wouldn't have to worry about bucking broomsticks or swallowing golden snitches.

 _That_ had been a surprisingly simple decision for Harry to make. While he liked Quidditch (both watching and participating in it), he really preferred to simply _fly_ without the constraints of rules. (His conscience on potentially stealing the Inter-House Quidditch Cup from Oliver Wood may have also struck him, partially leading to this decision.) He also felt that what with dealing with trying to get the Slytherins to accept him—because Theo was sure that Harry would be tested extensively on whether or not the House should accept him—and searching Hogwarts' extensive library for the ritual that sent them back in time would take up much of his time.

Theo _had_ managed to talk him into trying out for the team in third year, however, as he said it would gain him a slight advantage in the political game Harry was going to participate in. Harry hadn't seen how his playing Quidditch would win him any favours, but he had elected to trust Theo on that. The boy _had_ survived seven years as a Slytherin and he hadn't sunk to the bottom of the totem pole despite not being particularly social.

They had also spoken shortly on how to handle the arrival of Harry's Hogwarts letter. It was a difficult decision to make, but Harry had decided it was best to let the whole event play out like it had the first time. Not only would it be amusing to watch Vernon go crazy for a week, but Harry also didn't know _why_ Hagrid had been the one to deliver his letter.

Usually, when someone who was Muggle-raised ( _not_ just Muggleborn) received their Hogwarts letter, the Deputy Headmaster or Headmistress would deliver their letter personally. That had been something Theo had pointed out which made a lot of questions pop up in his mind. Why had Hagrid, who had no experience in the Muggle world, been sent to introduce Harry to the wizarding one? Why hadn't McGonagall, who had known that Harry grew up with his Muggle relatives, delivered his letter instead? Had Dumbledore asked Hagrid to deliver his letter to him? Or had he figured that since Hagrid was picking up something at Gringotts already, that he might as well take Harry with him and kill two birds with one stone?

Theo had suggested that perhaps Dumbledore had wanted to keep an eye on Harry or gauge how Harry reacted to the wizarding world via Hagrid. It was no secret that the half-giant trusted Dumbledore extensively, so he wouldn't have thought twice about the headmaster asking him to let him know how young Harry reacted to the wizarding world and the truth of his parents' deaths.

That had been something Harry could see the old headmaster doing, though it disappointed him greatly. He had come to terms with Dumbledore's manipulations—because that's what they were, no matter how well-meaning they were—but it still upset him a bit to think about it. And since that idea was certainly viable, Harry had done his best to react as he had during his first trip to Diagon Alley, which had been more emotional than he'd thought it'd be because Diagon Alley hadn't looked like it was recovering from a war anymore. Still, the thought that Hagrid would report back to Dumbledore had lingered in the back of his mind, dimming his mood greatly.

At least he had managed to acquire his Gringotts key, which would see some use in the future.

***

“Happy birthday.”

Harry looked up from where he had been reading over his shopping list. Theo stood in front of him with a small packaged gift-wrapped with an edition of the Daily Prophet.

“What’s this?” Harry asked with furrowed brows, taking the small package. He flipped it over and the face of Cornelius Fudge grinned up at him. Harry’s lips twitched up in a sneer. Godric, he hated that man. Fudge had been one of the main reasons Harry had a difficult few years at school and he hadn’t been any better after the war. He certainly wasn't looking forward to dealing with the man, but at least he knew how to handle him this time around.

“It’s a birthday present,” said Theo dryly as he sat down across from him.

Harry’s face immediately began to burn. “Oh, you didn’t have to…” he immediately blustered. Even years after he got his first gift (and he was very thankful to have Hedwig again), Harry still became embarrassed whenever he was given something. It had been nice to receive gifts, and he’d kept every single one—in fact, before he’d been sent back in time, Harry had actually carried around the penknife Sirius had gifted to him—but it had gotten very old and very embarrassing because everyone had been gifting him things after he defeated Voldemort at last.

“Thank you,” Harry said quietly when Theo merely raised a brow at him. He flipped the package back over and carefully lifted the edge of the newspaper. It took a little tug and a silent _Finite_ , but the sticking charm came loose, revealing a handsome green-scaled journal. Harry ran his fingers over the snake scales, feeling the magic that Theo had imbued in the book. “What did you do to it?”

Theo’s slightly quirked lip told him that he wasn’t surprised that Harry had immediately cottoned on. He pulled a similar-looking journal out, blue this time, and opened it. He wrote something on the front page, making Harry’s journal heat up slightly. Harry flipped open the front cover, took brief notice of the gold inlay of his name in a way reminiscent of Tom Riddle's journal, and looked at the words that had written themselves on the front page.

_?Figure it out yet_

Harry’s eyes lit up. “That’s brilliant!” he praised Theo, his eyes trailing over the book as he felt the magic imbued in it. His fingers itched to trace over the pages and find out what spells had been tied into them.

Theo smirked before nodding toward the journal. “Go on,” he said, “I know you want to pick at it.”

“Did you use the Protean Charm?” Harry guessed at once as a smile crossed his face, pleasantly surprised that Theo knew that he’d be itching to pick apart his spellwork. He flipped through the pages of the journal, his magic leaking through his fingertips to analyze what had been put into them.

Theo’s moonstone eyes lit up slightly at the subject. “I did,” he confirmed. “That Galleon of yours gave me the idea.”

“Mhm,” Harry hummed, most of his focus on identifying the spells Theo had put into the journal. Each page had the Protean Charm on it—which had been cast with Theo's magic—along with the spells that the book manufacturers had done to prevent them from ripping or from ink bleeding through. The journal also happened to have an expanding and featherweight charm on it—the expanding charm making it have the possibility to have triple the number of pages it looked like it had and the featherweight charm making it so that it stayed the same weight no matter how many pages were added in the future—along with a spell that looked like a cross between a heating charm, an alarm, and what looked to be a light charm that was tied into a proximity ward of sorts.

“This spell here…” Harry said, picking at it and making it visible for Theo to see, “it’s an alarm, right?”

Theo merely had to touch the spell to identify what it was. While he didn’t have the curse-breaking skills that Harry had that allowed him to pick apart various spells and analyze what they did in a matter of moments, he was magically sensitive and intelligent enough to identify any spells he’d felt before, and especially ones that he himself cast or created.

He nodded. “It connected to your magical signature,” he stated, knowing Harry would immediately catch on that it tied into his magic the moment he began to feel out the magic that was in it. _Sneaky,_ Harry mused mentally. _Theo knew I couldn't resist picking at his enchantments._ “The alarm will hiss like a snake if you’re near it, the heating charm will warm when the book is touching you but not open, and if you’re not near it, this emblem here will light up until you open the journal.” What Theo did not have to say was that the proximity ward was what determined which spell would activate, which Harry thought was particularly clever.

Theo flipped the journal so that its spine was facing Harry, revealing a small serpent curling around a lily. The emblem, like his name on the inside of the cover, was inlaid in gold. It was in the centre of the book’s spine and about two inches long. Harry reached out to touch the lily gently.

“Thank you,” he murmured, his voice no higher than a whisper. Theo did not need to ask him to specify what for. It was clear that Harry was referring to the lily, a clear representation of his mother. ”It’s beautiful.”

"I thought it would be a nice touch," said Theo, bowing his head just a tad. He then nodded to the money pouch Harry had hanging around his neck. "Are you ready to go?"

Since Harry hadn't been able to get everything he required or wanted without tipping off Hagrid a few days ago, he had decided to tag along with Theo's shopping trip. He grabbed his list and jumped off his chair, ignoring the fact that he still wasn't tall enough to touch the pub's floor. _That's going to get real annoying real fast,_ he thought.

"Did you already get some of your school stuff?" Harry asked Theo. He didn't particularly mind helping Theo get the rest of his stuff, but he'd rather not brave the well-known stationary and bookshops. They'd have to go there eventually, he knew, to pick up some books and extra parchment for their studies, but he'd rather not have to deal with everyone ravaging the schoolbook bookshelves. Theo nodded, dismissing that worry for the moment. "Where to first, do you think?" he said, his eyes scanning his list of items again. He didn't have many specific items written down, mostly just a few notes of what he should look into.

Theo's blue-silver eyes trailed over Harry's transfigured clothing. "Clothes. The rags you walked around in won't cut it in Slytherin," he said immediately. "They're fine for sleeping, but you'll need something casual for the weekends and some trousers and button-downs to wear under your robes. I'll need to get mine, as well, so you won't have to brave the shopkeep alone."

Harry nodded and ignored Theo's teasing tone. He had already planned to pick up a whole new wardrobe, both Muggle and wizarding. One of the main reasons Harry hadn't bought himself new clothes as a kid was because he hadn't wanted to make Ron feel bad and because he hadn't known the extent of the Potter fortune—which would allow him to feel comfortably for his whole life with money to spare—and he hadn't wanted to "waste" his parents' money on clothes when he already had some. Now though, since he knew that his vault was only an heir vault and that he had plenty of money, he wasn't about to skim on clothing.

One of the first things he'd bought after the war was a whole new wardrobe since all of his were practically destroyed, and while he didn't buy the type of clothes that rich purebloods did, he did spend a few hundred Galleons on getting himself kitted out. The feeling of wearing clothes that not only fit well but were completely _his_ had been amazing. Harry also knew that if he wanted to get anywhere in the Slytherin food chain, then he had to _dress_ like he deserved to be high on the Slytherin food chain.

So that meant expensive fabrics and modern-cut, and most particularly, _new_ robes.

Instead of heading to Madam Malkin's, Theo steered Harry toward Twilfitt and Tattings. Harry mentally groaned. Twilfitt and Tattings sold expensive clothing, clothing that was only available to witches and wizards with a lot of money. But it wasn't the price of their clothing that had Harry groaning, it was the fact that almost all of the clothing that the shop sold were custom fit.

He would no doubt have to get his robes tailored if Theo had anything to say about it.

Theo, catching the displeased expression on his face, smirked at him as he pushed the door open to the shop. Harry's eyes flickered around immediately, taking in every square inch of the shop that he could get his eyes on. The shop was covered in rich, vibrantly coloured fabric. Various robes, both male and female in style, were hung up for everyone to see; there were work robes, everyday robes, semi-formal robes, formal robes, dress robes, and what Harry was looking for, school robes.

There was also a section of the shop dedicated to shirts, trousers, dresses, skirts, and embarrassingly, both men's and women's undergarments. Harry trailed his eyes along the elaborately patterned shirts that he'd often seen purebloods wear and the well-pressed slacks hung up next to them. He couldn't deny that the clothing looked nice, but he wasn't one for elaborate patterns.

The far wall of the shop, near the dressing and tailoring rooms, was full of shoes of varying styles. There were loafers, work shoes, heels, and boots—both heeled and not, even for the male's shoes. It wasn't uncommon to find a wizard wearing boots with heels.

"Good morning," someone said to his right as he finished taking in the shop. Harry turned to the shopkeep, a well-dressed man in his mid-forties to fifties, who he had felt approaching them via his magic. "What can I do for you boys?"

"We need our school robes and I need a full wardrobe and some shoes," said Harry immediately while Theo just nodded.

"Follow me," the shopkeep said, leading them to the back of the shop to the rooms to get tailored. "I'll measure you and pin your school robes up, and you can go ahead and choose which styles, colours, and fabric-type you'll like for the rest of your clothes while I get those sorted."

Harry and Theo nodded silently as they were ushered into one of the tailoring rooms. Since Theo had less to be measured for, he jumped up on the stool first. It didn't take long for the shopkeep to pin up his robes and for Harry to get his own measurements taken.

Harry held himself stiffly as the man's hands fluttered around him, measuring across his shoulders, waist, torso, hips, and wherever else tailors measure. He had always been wary about people touching him, had really only tolerated it when Hermione or Mrs Weasley hugged him because he didn't want to be awkward, and even if the man was using magic to measure him, it made him feel very uncomfortable. He let out a silent breath of relief when the man finished pinning up his robes. Even with the number of nutrition potions and the larger portions of food he'd managed to choke down, Harry was still significantly smaller than the average eleven-year-old. Some _nine-year-olds_ he'd seen were larger than him.

"Could you get my clothes charmed to grow with me?" Harry asked the shopkeep as he jumped off the stool, who confirmed that he could but that the charms will only last about a year or two depending on how he grew. Theo raised a brow at him as they walked toward the shirts and trousers section of the shirt and Harry hissed, "I _hate_ getting my clothes custom-fit. I'm not going to do it more than I need to."

Theo, who had long since become used to getting measured for his clothes, merely glanced at him with a slight quirk of the corner of his mouth. Harry scowled at him. The last time he'd gotten his clothes custom-fit had been for when he had to attend his award ceremony for his Order of Merlin and dress robes were required. The female assistant who had been sent to measure him had touched him more than was necessary, which had been very uncomfortable, to say the least.

As Theo went around to pick up some new clothes to give himself something to do, Harry first went to the undergarments section and selected a few pairs of pants. All the undergarments he had were transfigured from Dudley's old underwear, which was disgusting, so he wasn't about to skimp out on those. He dropped them in the bottom of a basket he picked up and went around choosing a few pairs of trousers and some shirts.

The trousers he picked mostly stayed in the realm of black and grey, though he did choose a pair of navy slacks. The shirts he chose were a combination of short and long sleeves, all of a decent quality material but were rather simple in design. He wasn't one to trot about in shirts with stitched on jewels or emblems on them. They varied in colour, mostly white for school hours, but some were green, blue, and black. There was a crimson one that he chose, though, that gave him a pang of nostalgia for his Gryffindor days.

For a moment, he thought of what would happen if he chose Gryffindor again, but then he shook the thought off. He and Theo had discussed Slytherin and what Harry would have to do to make it in that House over days of long meetings, and he wasn't about to break Theo's trust and go back to Gryffindor. Besides, he wasn't even sure if he _could_ go back to his old House. He wasn't a particularly good fit for it anymore.

He walked past a display of cloaks on his ways to the shoes and his eyes caught sight of a black cloak with simply-stylized green embroidery. Before he thought about it, his fingers reached out to touch the fabric. It was thick and warm and very soft, and with a closer look, he could see that it had a very fine line of fur along the edges and the inside. It was an expensive cloak, he wouldn't deny that, and it made him very interested in it.

"You should get it," Theo said. Harry would have jumped and sworn loudly if he hadn't felt Theo creeping up silently on him, as he tended to do. Harry was sure that the boy was quieter than _he_ was, even without the use of a silencing charm. He turned to look at his friend.

"I'll outgrow it in a few years," he said with a slight frown. Harry may be willing to buy a full wardrobe of expensive clothing, but he was paying extra to make them last at least two or three years. He would definitely outgrow this cloak in a few years and he wasn't about to waste his money on something so expensive, especially since the price tag claimed it to be seventy-five Galleons, which was around three hundred and seventy-five British pounds.

Maybe he'll buy it when he's older and would get multiple years' use of it.

Theo snorted lightly and gave Harry a pointed stare. "Then buy an adult-sized one and shrink it," he said with exasperation. Harry still hesitated. The truth was, while he had no problem with buying a new wardrobe here that he would outgrow in a few years, he wasn't sure if he should spend so much money on a cloak when he already had a new one. It felt too much like a waste, like an indulgence.

"Maybe later," Harry said after a few more moments, turning away and toward the racks of shoes. He chose a pair of plain black semi-formal ankle boots that will fit in at school. He could feel that they were charmed to fit a person's feet, so he wouldn't have to wait to get them custom-made, either. There were charms on them to grow along with you, too, he could sense. He'd be able to wear them out of the store if he wanted to.

The shopkeep had finished hemming their robes by the time they were done with their shopping, and Harry filled out a clothes order to pick up in a week and he boxed up his shoes and wrapped up his robes to go.

The next item and-or place Harry checked off on the list was the apothecary where he purchased a few extra ingredients, items, and an order of nutrition and appetite-stimulating potions. He purchased an extra cauldron, one larger than the school required, as well as another case of crystal phials. He had a feeling that he would be in need of various potions in Hogwarts that he couldn't be caught purchasing or stealing from the hospital wing. Dreamless Sleep and Calming Draughts were two of those potions.

Harry wasn't stupid enough to deny that returning to Hogwarts wouldn't bring up any nasty memories. Just stepping foot in the castle would probably cause him to panic due to the memories lurking in the halls. Nervous children were something Harry knew that Madam Pomfrey dealt with, but it would get extremely suspicious if Harry started to visit her daily for Calming Draughts or Dreamless Sleep potions. Asking for those types of potions would bring the wrong type of attention on him, attention Harry _did not_ need if he was going into Slytherin.

Theo merely followed Harry's example silently and it made Harry wonder what type of hell Theo would be returning to. He clearly remembered what Neville and Ginny had shared about the year Snape reigned as headmaster; that students were forced to torture or be tortured. He wondered if Theo had done the torturing or had been tortured, or perhaps it had been both.

He shook his head and pushed those thoughts away, finishing his transaction with a slight smile up at the cashier who didn't recognize him remotely. Harry had worn a glamour every time he'd gone to Diagon Alley, and he was currently sporting dusty blonde hair and plain brown eyes. His clothes were transfigured into a plain pair of trousers and boots and a black robe. And with his scar covered up, he looked like any other kid; unassuming, nothing like the Boy-Who-Lived.

It was a relief.

His journey to Diagon the other day had gone similarly to the first time around. He'd been swamped in the Leaky Cauldron, but at least him playing shy had kept most people from trying to touch him. The memory of that many hands and people near him had had a sick feeling pool in his stomach. He _really_ didn't like it when people touched him.

The rest of the day had gone smoothly, though the last stop to Ollivander's had been… interesting.

_Harry shivered slightly as he walked through the door to Ollivander's shop, the hair on his arms rising as goosebumps travelled down his arms. Magic was thick and heavy in the air, stagnant almost if it wasn’t for the faint stirring of the wands’ magical cores when he stepped through without a wand (it was almost as if they **knew** he had no wand on him). The faint tinglings of a ward rippled slightly like faintly moving water when he crossed over the doorway._

_It didn’t take but a moment for Harry to recognize the ward for what it was. It was a mixture of an age-line and an activation spell._

_Contrary to popular belief, magical children didn’t have the Trace on them the moment they were born. Instead, wandcrafters were legally obligated to put a latent spell on each wand they made that connected to some sort of system in the Misuse of Magic Office in the Ministry. Wards were put on their doors so when someone under the age of seventeen bought a wand and left with it, the Trace would activate. But, the Trace would only alert the ministry depending on who wielded the wand._

_You see, Ollivander didn’t have people swish or flick their wands for nothing. Yes, it was to see if someone’s wand fit them perfectly, but it was also for the wand’s magical core to match the person’s magical core. Once activated properly, the Trace would alert the Ministry if that matched magical core was using that particular wand._

_And as the ward that activated the Trace had an age-line infused with it (which identified a person’s age), it also set a sort of timeclock on the Trace spell so when a person became of age, the Trace on their wand dispersed, leaving it perfectly usable for the now of-age witch or wizard._

_"Good afternoon," said a soft voice that nearly made Harry jump. He had been so occupied analyzing the ward Ollivander had over his shop that he had nearly missed the man's approach._

_"Hello," Harry greeted the old wandmaker._

_"Ah yes,” said the man. “Yes, yes. I thought I’d be seeing you soon. Harry Potter.” It wasn’t a question but Harry inclined his head anyway. “You have your mother’s eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wand. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wand for charm work." Ollivander stepped forward, closer to him, and Harry resisted the urge to shy away. "Your father, on the other hand, favoured a mahogany wand. Eleven inches. Pliable. A little more power and excellent for transfiguration. Well, I say your father favoured it—it’s really the wand that chooses the wizard, of course."_

_This was something Harry knew well. The wand did choose the wizard, though it wasn't incapable of connecting with a person that wasn't its owner. Harry could remember, if he thought back on it, how well Draco's wand had connected to his magic. It had chosen him at that moment; when he'd defeated the other boy—perhaps man would be the better term considering that they were in a war, no matter their age—in a duel._

_Ollivander leaned a little closer and Harry shied away this time, refusing to look into the man's eyes. He had a thought that the man must be a natural legilimens and that's why his silvery eyes seemed to peer into your soul. Ollivander's hand had lifted toward his forehead, a long spindly finger aiming at his scar._

_"I’m sorry to say I sold the wand that did it,” he said softly, pulling away when it became clear that Harry was uncomfortable. “Thirteen-and-a-half inches. Yew. Powerful wand, very powerful, and in the wrong hands… well, if I’d known what that wand was going out into the world to do…"_

_"You wouldn't have sold it?" Harry asked with a slightly tilted head. He stared into Ollivander's eyes then. He had a feeling that even if Ollivander knew the power Tom Riddle would have carrying that wand, he still would have sold it. Crafted it. Never would have even thought to snap it._

_Ollivander's paper-thin lips twisted up in a faint, knowing smile. "Perhaps, perhaps not…" he said before Hagrid's great bulk gained his attention._

The rest of the visit had gone the same as before. Though, just for a moment when he'd held his holly wand, Harry had thought it wouldn't have bonded with him. It had warmed greatly in his hand, the magic surging around frantically, but then it had burnt to his magic, burrowed into his core, and let out a shower of powerful silver sparks that had a wind rushing through the store, displacing loose papers.

Even now, sitting in a wand holster against his arm, it continued to burn pleasantly.

Harry shook his head and followed Theo into a stationery shop. It wasn't Scribbulus's, which was the main shop that people went to buy their stuff, and was rather small and situated between the junk shop and a second-hand robe shop. The shop was small enough that it only needed one employee, the shopkeep, which Harry knew could pretty much see the whole shop from his vantage point of the front counter to the right of the door. The shopkeep merely looked up at them when the doorbell rang before looking back down at his book in boredom.

Theo went off toward the quills while Harry went to grab some parchment. The store had a few different options based on which animal the parchment came from, then the size (in scrolls or sheets of paper), and then the charms on them. Harry picked up a stack of sheet paper that was not charmed since he could do it himself and turned to leave before he caught sight of some decorative parchment. It was the type of parchment that he recognized people used when writing letters to important people. He fingered a sheet of champagne-coloured parchment, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, before picking up a small stack. He also picked up some scarlet and royal blue wax and a _P_ stamp.

Like many of the older families, Harry's family had a coat of arms. The colours were mainly gold and scarlet, but with a little bit of blue; gold which stood for wisdom, generosity, glory, constancy, and faith, scarlet meaning fortitude and victory, and blue signifying loyalty, chastity, truth, strength, and faith. The colours easily backed up the family motto “Audaces Fortuna Iuvat” meaning “Fortune Favours the Bold” or “Fortune Favours the Brave.” The family’s crest, the animal atop the helm of the coat of arms, also known as its Charge, was a lion, the symbol of strength and valour.

 _Very Gryffindor,_ thought Harry. _Everyone'll be in for a surprise._

He picked up some scarlet and blue ink, as well, and a few dictation quills which he thought might be useful if he didn't feel like writing in the future. It would be useful for when he and Theo are discussing certain things, at any rate.

"Are you planning on writing to people?" Theo asked, nodding to the decorative parchment.

"Maybe, maybe not," Harry said with a shrug. "I don't think I'll need it this year or the next, but it'll be nice to have it on hand just in case I do."

Theo just shrugged and they bought their items before turning to the next few stores. They stopped by the Magical Menagerie for Theo to get some Stunned mice for his cat—a large black and dark grey marble tabby named Obsidian that Harry had met once Before (which they had begun to call the previous timeline)—and some speciality owl treats for Hedwig that Harry knew she liked. He may be spoiling his owl, but it had been years since he'd last seen her and she had taken a Killing Curse for him, so he felt that even if she didn't remember it that she deserved the treats anyway.

Harry dipped into the junk shop and bought some random knickknacks to mess about with while Theo headed into a shop that sold some hardware. They flitted about Carkitt Market for a bit on their way to Knockturn Alley. Carkitt Market was set about in one of those large placed enclosed with a wrought-iron arcade that had both booths and storefronts, which sold a variety of items; such as clothes, jewellery, charmed amulets, second-hand books, knickknacks, paintings, and fresh produce, the latter of which Harry bought and got a stasis charm on. The first time he had seen Carkitt Market had been there was when he first started out Auror Training; it was a mild place full of bartering and trading, and all rookies were sent there to stop petty theft and the like. When he'd found out about the fresh produce and herbs they sold, Harry had started to get his food there. While Kreacher most often cooked for Harry, Harry had come to like cooking despite being forced to do it with the Dursleys. It was a way for him to wind down after a long day in the office.

Carkitt Market was set on Horizont Alley, which cut horizontally through Diagon Alley at Gringotts. Horizont met up with Knockturn in an alternate entrance to the alley, and a full corner of the market was situated at that opening and the various residents of Knockturn set up shop there in hopes of a quick buck—or Galleon.

Despite what Harry had thought of Knockturn Alley—or to be more precise, what he had _heard_ about it—it wasn't just a place where the evils of society congregated. Sure, there were some shady shops (Harry had been called to check in on Borgin and Burkes numerous times in the past) and some not-so-legal dealings (he was reminded of the bust he and Theo had done on that magical animal black market), but it was mostly full of the poorer population of Magical Britain. That meant poor witches and wizards like the Weasleys who couldn't afford their own home, werewolves, vampires, hags, and various other "magical beings."

This was the portion of the market that Harry and Theo found themselves in. Theo picked up a few odd-looking objects with multiple gears and moving parts and Harry spotted some objects that he could feel were charmed. Most had spells on them that weren't malicious, though a few of them felt darker than other magics. Harry was drawn to a large painted figurine of a grim which looked a lot like Padfoot. From what he could feel with a cursory examination, it was charmed to give people nightmares the more they were around or came in contact with it. He swiftly broke the mild curse and left the deteriorated animation charm it had on it. He'd fiddle with it later to see if he could fix it, if only to get rid of the boredom at Privet Drive.

When he handed the grim to the booth manager, the man eyed him suspiciously. "Yeh know that's Death's omen, righ', sonny?" said the man.

"He looks like the dog my dad had," said Harry as an explanation. White lies and half-lies were the best types of lies. The man continued to eye him suspiciously and Harry thought that maybe the man had caught him fiddling with the curse on it. He merely paid for the figurine, asked the man to shrink it for him, before moving on. Another cursory glance of this corner of the market showed that there were a few stalls with old-looking (and illegal-looking) books. Most of the books were useless to Harry, though he picked up an old edition of _Moste Potente Potions_. Theo was haggling a guy over the price of a book, which was titled _Huh's Grimoire_. He managed to get the price down to two Galleons in a matter of minutes before placing the book in his bag and stepping away from the book.

"You've been doing your research," Harry commented as he fell into step with Theo. They were heading out of Carkitt Market and into Knockturn now. They only had to walk a few storefronts down Horizont Alley before it met with Knockturn Alley.

Theo glanced at Harry with his normally narrow, shrewd gaze and he lifted a brow. "One of my ancestors was a healer who studied in Egypt," he said. "We have plenty of books on Heka, but nothing on time travel."

Harry looked at him in interest. He had read of Heka, of course. A good portion of Alexandria's magical library was dedicated to him since he was not only the Egyptian god of magic and medicine but also the personification of magic itself who had been there before all other gods and goddesses. He'd only really skimmed a few books about him to see if there were any mentions of time travel, and in his obsessed state, Harry had completely dismissed him when he saw none. Now, no longer clouded by the consuming need of going back in time, he was curious. What type of magic was Heka, other than healing? He could remember reading that it was ritualistic magic. What type of rituals were they and had Tom Riddle studied them?

They came upon a bookshop not far into the alley, which Harry could remember raiding for illegal books. Perhaps he should feel wrong to actually be _buying_ these books and not doing anything about it. He was an Auror, after all. But then, his mind reminded him that he'd done plenty of things that Aurors wouldn't approve of. He'd killed in the war, he'd learned, and he'd even tortured. Yes, it was only once, but he had not thought twice about it and he had even _enjoyed_ it. He had also lived in a house full of illegal books and items. Mrs Weasley hadn't been able to throw all of them away; Grimmauld Place was the Blacks' ancestral home, which had housed numerous dark witches and wizards and Slytherins. The things found lying around weren't the only dark objects that were in the house.

The reminder of how Mrs Weasley, no matter how good-intentioned, completely took over Sirius's house and threw everything grated on him. Numerous books that had been in the smaller, attainable libraries had been thrown out like yesterday's trash. He hadn't cared in the time, nor had Sirius, but Hermione had had a point. She had been furious to discover the books were being thrown out, and Remus to a point. They both prized knowledge, no matter how dark it was. And Harry figured that those books weren't even extremely dark or else they would have been hidden in the Blacks' library. Now he understood what Hermione and Remus had been feeling; throwing out such knowledge, such _power_ , got under his skin and made him itch.

Before his magic could react to his irritation, he took a few breaths to calm down, using the practise he had with Occlumency to help him. The agitation faded and he shook his head, focusing on the books in front of him. Eventually, he and Theo finished browsing the few other shops and went their separate ways; money pouches lighter but their satchels heavier, and with more research to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave a comment telling me what your favourite part of this chapter was! And feel free to ask me any questions about the fic!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was planning on making this chapter go through the train ride and Harry getting Sorted but decided it was too long and I needed to update. Enjoy!

Harry boredly flipped through his first year Charms textbook from where he sat on the bed in his "new" room. He had considered making the Dursleys give him the guest room, the one that Marge slept in when she visited, but he decided that he didn't want to deal with Marge's inevitable bitching. Oh, he didn't plan on staying for  _ that _ particular visit, but he didn't want the risk of the woman trashing his room out of some misplaced fury and indignation that she was pushed into a tiny room while he got a room at all.

He had his single window wide open to stave off the claustrophobia and for Hedwig's return. Despite what most people thought, snowy owls were diurnal, meaning that they were most active during the day. She'd be back by nightfall to rest and sleep, Harry figured, since she hadn't had much of a chance to spread her wings since he got her. There was no need for her to deliver letters since the only person Harry could write to was Theo, and they circumvented that with Theo's journals.

Harry hadn't gone to Diagon Alley since that last visit with Theo and he was beginning to feel a little cooped up. It had only been a week and a half since he hadn't needed to meet with Theo anymore, and despite all of the running he's been doing recently, the restlessness and feeling of claustrophobia were only increasing by the day. Dudley's second bedroom was exactly as he remembered it; small, cramped, and—before Harry cleaned it out—cluttered with Dudley's broken toys. He'd cleaned it up some by removing all of the broken toys and fixing some of the broken furniture—and Dudley had taken whatever toys worked or he didn't want Harry getting his freakish hands on them—but that still didn't remove the fact that the bedroom was  _ small _ .

While no longer cluttered with Dudley's broken toys, it still had things in it that were taking up space. There was Harry's small twin bed that was pressed up against the one wall next to the window, there was the large (previously broken) wardrobe at the foot of his bed, and then there was the desk against the other wall next to the window. There was also that large black cage that had once held Dudley's parrot—Harry could remember that Dudley traded it for the broken air rifle that he'd thrown away right after getting the room—which was Hedwig's new home. It sat beside his desk, propped up on four little wheels for easy movement, and was annoyingly taller than him. Just in case Harry had to keep Hedwig inside—and he was definitely not going to allow his uncle to lock her up again—then she had something bigger than that little golden travel cage she was gifted to him in. He had kept that cage just in case he needed it but it sat on the floor of his wardrobe out of the way.

His school trunk sat at the foot of his bed, filled with his wizarding clothes, his wand, and his Potions stuff, and his self-made cooling cupboard sat under his bed, charmed shut and full of the food Harry bought from Carkitt Market. He put a notice-me-not charm on it just in case his relatives—or most likely Dudley—went into his room if he forgot to lock the door.

It wasn't just the floor space was cluttered, either; there were also a number of shelves on the walls, which had been half-filled before Harry ever got the room. Half of them had dusty books that Harry hadn't bothered to look through since they had been Dudley's while the other half had the things that Harry had started to collect. All of his newly bought textbooks—save for the one he was currently using, of course—sat on one shelf, while the books he'd bought on idle visits to Knockturn or had bought a week ago with Theo sat on two other shelves.

Some of them were rather large, dusty tomes that leaked old magic (which felt like the waning manufacturer's magic and dark magic), while others were thin and leather-bound. One of them was rather thick and ornate; bound with leather over wood with metal corners and clasps (Harry had used the spell he'd overheard Dung explaining to see what metal it was and it turns out that the metal was pure copper), and it had different precious stones (alexandrite, garnet, amber, bloodstone, emerald, pearl, jade, lapis lazuli, moonstone, quartz, serpentine, tiger's eye, turquoise, and a rather large centre stone that emitted a hissing-hum tone whenever he touched it).

It was spelled shut and needed a key to be opened, and Harry hadn't yet taken the chance to see if he could try and open it. He had mostly bought it for that factor if he was being honest. He needed to stave off the boredom somehow and picking at the magic holding an old book's secrets was just one way to do that.

His remaining two shelves held a few knick-knacks that he'd picked up or found; some crystals that he could use for rituals (if he wanted to, that was) that he'd bought from a bin in Carkitt Market, some dream catchers in hopes that they would do something about the dreams that plagued him at night, a model of a thestral that had caught his eye for some reason, and a rune-carving set that he couldn't pass up despite not knowing how to carve runes properly.

His desk held a few other things; his parchment and quills, Muggle textbooks and pens, the large Padfoot-shaped figurine he still had yet to tinker with, and a calligraphy set that someone had gifted to Dudley, who hadn't wanted it back. Harry would have thrown it out simply on the principle of being  _ Dudley's _ , but the set was expensive-looking and had quality ink and a few eagle quills (one bald eagle, one golden eagle, and a black one with a white tip that he didn't recognize), which were  _ really expensive _ . Harry was actually surprised that Petunia hadn't thrown the thing out when Dudey had gotten it; it no doubt would have reminded her of the wizarding world and her sister. Though, he figured that she probably didn't throw it out simply because there was a chance that whoever had gifted Dudley the set might want to see it again or something.

Harry blew out a forceful breath and dragged his eyes back to his Charms text. He managed to read another passage before he slammed the book shut, scrubbing his hands over his face. His skin itched as if he had most of his magic locked up, but he could feel it saturating his room, buzzing with his irritation. Dropping his hands into his lap, Harry looked up. His eyes fell on the grim statue sitting on his desk and an idea drifted through his mind.

He hadn't been using his magic a lot, so what if tinkering with it a bit would make him calm down?

Instead of getting up to get the figurine, Harry merely summoned it wandlessly. It landed in his hands and he set it on the bed in front of him before reaching out to touch it without any worry since he knew that it didn't have any curses on it anymore. His fingertips ran over the detailed sculpted fur and his eyes fell closed as his magic felt out the magic that was imbued in the sculpture.

The magic that had animated it was very faint and worn down, no doubt due to years of use. He almost considered erasing it and trying to figure out how to do the animation himself but decided to study the waning charm. Harry hadn't studied much about animation spells other than what he'd learned in Transfiguration and Charms, which were basic or intermediate at best. He would be relying on what he'd learnt about picking apart spells to help him figure out the charm.

He analyzed the magic in the figurine slowly, making mental notes of the different parts of spells that he could identify. It had the basis of a  _ Locomotor _ spell, which was the basis of almost all movement charms. It was used in Defence spells like  _ Locomotor Mortis _ which was the Leg-Locker Curse, or  _ Locomotor trunks _ which could be used to move trunks (or whatever the object was), and the most notable use of the charm had been during the Battle of Hogwarts. It was a part of the spell that had moved the statues and armour in Hogwarts to attack, though Harry figured that they had been charmed by older Headmasters to move or react a certain way when directed.

_ Locomotor _ on its own was typically used to just move something the way you directed it, such as with a school trunk. When you cast the spell on the trunk, it would make it levitate and you could then direct the trunk to go in a certain direction you wanted to. In this way, it was also similar to the spell  _ Mobilicorpus _ , which is used to move a body, or  _ Mobiliarbus _ , which could be used to move a tree or wooden objects. Both meant "movement" or "to move."

Harry supposed he could just use the spell  _ Piertotum Locomotor _ , which would move the statue however he wanted to. The spell, if he translated it properly, meant something like "the whole position moves dutifully," though if he used the French word  _ Pierre _ as the basis of  _ Pier-totum _ , then he would get "the stone moves position," which also fit with what he wanted. However,  _ Piertotum Locomotor _ was the type of spell that would fade when you stopped powering it or when whatever magic you put into it faded. Harry would also have to direct it what to do, which he didn't necessarily want. He wanted the little statue to actually act like a dog, but able to come to life or "freeze" when he wanted it to.

Other spell fragments that he could detect were merely used to "trigger" the animation spell on the figurine. Probably something like a touch or a spoken word. There was also one that he recognized from when he studied in Egypt. One of the tombs that he had managed to weasel his way into studying had been decorated with cat statues, and when one of the Curse-Breakers had walked into the room, the cats had come alive. The statues had been transfigured, giving them the appearance of actual cats; meaning fur, claws, and teeth. It was the same thing with the grim figurine, Harry realized. The spell was tied into the "trigger," which meant that the grim would assume a dog-like appearance with fur and all. That at least saved him from having to transfigure the outside of the figurine and making it look like a stuffed animal or something.

The spell, Harry supposed, also didn't just make the statues just resemble cats, either, it actually made them into cats. It gave them the instincts and the intelligence—or perhaps  _ more _ intelligence—of a cat. Now that the thought crossed his mind, he identified the last spell fragment in the grim that was tied into the "trigger." It would give the grim some sort of intelligence, though Harry didn't really know if it was giving it a dog-like personality or something else. He figured that he could just tie that part into his spell-weaving when he fixed the grim, and if it turned out to be something bad, then he'd change it.

Analyzations done, Harry summoned a muggle notebook and a pen to write his observations into. This was something that he'd done ever since he started with his new hobbies. The spellcrafting books he'd picked up had recommended analyzing the spells put into different objects, which he had done since it allowed him to exercise his analyzing skills, and he'd originally made mental notes. His memory was very good at that point since he'd begun meditating every day for his Occlumency training, but he had found that writing down his observations as they came to him and then smoothing them out later helped him a lot. He still made mental notes if his hands were busy or if he didn't feel like writing or he was analyzing something on a mere whim like he was doing with the grim, though he sometimes dictated them aloud with a dictation quill.

He absentmindedly chewed on his thumbnail as he scribbled down the conclusion he made about the original spells put into the grim; the basis of the  _ Locomotor _ spells and how they worked, the transfiguration spell, the "trigger," and the unknown intelligence spell. A few extra notes were jotted down about the transfiguration and intelligence spell and how they had influenced the cat statues in the Egyptian tomb he'd been in, just for some extra background knowledge on that particular aspect of the spell.

Finishing the last of his observations about the faded spell in the grim, Harry set his notebook to the side and placed the grim in front of him. He backed up a bit, leaving enough room for him to work. If he did this correctly, and he was confident that he would, then the grim figurine should become an actual dog when he finished enchanting it. He would have to add the trigger spell afterwards to turn it back into a figurine—hopefully.

Fingertips touching the grim's head, Harry's magic began to flow into the sculpture. It felt much less agitated now that he was actively using it. He would have to write Theo and see if he was having problems with restlessness, and if so, then he would recommend for him to use a lot of wandless magic; either by destroying stuff to get his frustration out or by doing something else. Despite what some people may think, wandless magic wasn't some super rare thing that only ridiculously powerful witches or wizards were capable of. Almost all wizards were capable of it (the ones who weren't were typically late-bloomers who didn't have as much magic as the average witch or wizard) and most simply didn't put much work into it as other people did.

Since wandless magic was more advanced magic, it was taught in your NEWT Charms and Transfiguration classes. Harry had had to teach himself, though, since he skipped his seventh year and he studied for his NEWTs himself before taking them at the Ministry. Where other seventh-years would be guided in the art of wandless magic, Harry had to do it himself. He'd begun while on the run with Hermione, who had suggested that they use whatever advantage that they could get when they were a wand down, and he'd been able to levitate or summon things to himself along with a few simple spells like Aguamenti and Incendio. This was typically the extent of magic that average wizards did since they relied on their wands most of the time. However, with a lot of frustrating and tiring practice, you could get to the level of casting all of your spells wandlessly the same way you would a wand. They were less powerful than using your wand, mind, but using wandless magic worked when you were in a bind.

Instead of breaking the remains of the spell on the grim, Harry instead weaved his own magic into it. He removed most of the old, broken parts, though kept the fragment of a spell that gave the grim it's dog-like intelligence and appearance. It was strangely soothing and hard work to weave his own magic with the spells already there. It wasn't remotely difficult to layer spells on top of one another but to actually weave your magic into older magic, another person's magic, it was slightly more difficult. Some people's magic just didn't connect. It was like when a Muggle got a kidney transplant; sometimes the body accepted the foreign organ and sometimes it didn't.

His magic wasn't a match to the old magic imbued in the grim—such a thing wasn't possible unless you took a time turner and there were two of you or you were identical twins (and even then your magic wasn't completely identical, but they matched)—but his magic was kind of… compatible with the old magic. It was like using a wand that wasn't yours but you could use. Like when Harry had used Malfoy's wand and it had worked decently well for him, unlike Hermione's wand which had bucked against his magic. He had to use more power to make any spells he cast with that wand work.

Harry knew when he completed the spell; he would have to be blind in every way not to. His magic seemed to flare and click into place, his bed dipped under the weight of the grim statue growing, and a large mass barrelled into him, making him smack his head against the wall.

"Ow!" he hissed, rubbing the back of his head with his hand. His eyes snapped open as a wet tongue lapped at his cheek. The grim looked exactly like Padfoot was Harry's first thought. It made his heart squeeze tight for a moment and the dog seemed to sense his emotions, jumping off him with a slight whine. It sat with a tilted head, thick furry tail slapping against his comforter once.

He—because the dog was  _ definitely _ a he—was a large black thing that looked like a mix between an Irish Wolfhound and a Silken Windhound. It was large and had the bulk of a wolfhound, but it had the more thin-face and angled muzzle appearance of a Silken Windhound, instead of the blocky muzzle of a wolfhound and less of the face-obscuring fur, showing Harry the dog's golden eyes. When the grim spotted Harry's eyes on him, his tongue lolled out of his mouth and his thick furry tail wacked against the bed at a fast speed. He jumped on Harry again, snuffling at his clothes and making loud whuffing sounds.

There was the sound of someone walking up the stairs and Harry said commandingly, "Stop!" The dog froze like the statue he actually was and Harry's brows rose slightly as the grim stood still, his muzzle still pressed against his shoulder where the dog was sniffing. "Sit." The dog sat. When Dudley walked past his bedroom door, knocking his Smeltings stick against Harry's door, the dog didn't even twitch. It just sat still as commanded, large intelligent golden eyes staring into Harry's green ones.

"You're commanded to do as told," Harry said, his mind connecting the commands to the intelligence spell that he had analyzed but couldn't identify. The dog's ears perked at the word "command" and Harry's eyes narrowed slightly and he commanded, "Get off the bed," to test out the idea dawning inside his mind. The dog promptly did as told. Harry tested out a few different commands to work out the kinks of the spell; the dog sat when told to sit, stood when told to stand, barked when told to speak, and spun in a circle when told to chase his tail. For a final test, Harry cracked his bedroom door open and commanded the grim to get the tv remote without being seen.

Harry listened intently as the dog trotted down the hall, his nails barely clicking against the hardwood floor of the hallway. He held himself so quietly that he could hear the TV running downstairs, Vernon talking to someone on the telephone, and Petunia chatting in the garden with the neighbourhood wives. He could feel the grim moving around with his magic and thus didn't startle when a large black nose nudged his door open. If he had his magic locked up, though, he would have surely jumped at the dog's sudden entrance. The dog sat in front of him on the floor, the television remote held in his maw.

Harry couldn't help it—he laughed. It was a short bark of a sound that he swiftly muffled. "Good dog!" he couldn't help but coo, reaching out to scratch behind the dog's ears. The remote clattered onto the floor as the grim dropped it and instead jumped up, his large bear-like paws settling on Harry's shoulders as he lapped at Harry's face. Harry indulged himself in petting the dog and allowed it up onto his bed, where it curled up at his side, large tail hitting the wall and bed as it wagged.

"We're going to get into a lot of mischief," Harry told the dog with a mischievous grin spreading across his face as he pet between the dog's furry ears. Said furry ears perked at the last word and he lifted his head, woofing. "Mischief," said Harry curiously, making the dog woof again. "That your name, boy? Mischief?" Another resounding woof cemented the dog's new name.

_ At least I won't mix him up with Padfoot _ , thought Harry with a smirk,  _ though it's fitting. They'll make a pair. _

***

The morning of September 1st, 1991 dawned sunny and hot, the early morning sun waking Harry long before his alarm clock was due to go off. He groaned and rolled over, blocking the sun with his blanket in an attempt to fall back asleep. He had been up late last night conversing with Theo and packing all of his things for Hogwarts. He had been oddly nervous at the prospect of returning to the castle and it had taken him long into the night to fall asleep. At his movement, something big and heavy on his bed shuffled before jumping on him.

"Mischief!" Harry hissed in pain as the dog stepped on his stomach. Mischief lapped at his face, his large tail making loud thumping sounds against the wall. Loud hooting and wing shuffling joined in with the thumping and Harry sighed. "I'm up, I'm up!" he growled, shoving at Mischief's bulk. "If you don't get off me, I'm going to freeze you!" Mischief immediately jumped off Harry at the threat and Harry scrubbed at his slobber-coated face with his sleeping shirt.

Harry had taken to keeping Mischief unfrozen. He made a good running companion—because it would be odd if a snowy owl was flying with him on his runs—and he found some comfort with sleeping with the dog. The statue-turned-dog was a good guard dog, which was something had learned when he had gone running in the park a week or so ago. Dudley's usual gang had cornered him, and while he would have usually used his magic to get them to back off, he did have the conscience to know that hexing a bunch of eleven-year-olds when he was both a wizard and mentally twenty-one was immorally wrong and risky. At the time, Mischief had gone off to explore all the new scents his previously stone nose could take in, leaving him to cool down alone. When the group of bullies had cornered him, though, Mischief must have felt the agitation in his magic because he had barrelled out of the woods, heading straight for the kids.

They had scattered immediately because Mischief was a  _ big _ dog. Any person would be apprehensive if a two and a half foot tall, two hundred pound dog came running straight at them. After that little incident, all of the kids steered clear of Harry. And due to that, instead of keeping Mischief as a small statue like he was originally going to do, he mostly allowed him to laze around in his room with him. Since the dog was technically an animated statue, he didn't need to eat or use the bathroom, either, and the company was nice. It at least lessened his restlessness and the claustrophobic feeling he'd been getting since not going back to Diagon Alley, at any rate.

Hedwig hooted loudly, bringing Harry out of his thoughts. He shook his head and rolled over to look at the owl. Large amber eyes stared at him from where she sat in her cage, the look in her eyes demanding that he get off his arse and feed her.

"Fine," he sighed aloud, rolling out of bed and grumbling, "I didn't need the extra sleep anyway." He grabbed some Stunned mice for Hedwig and opened her cage for her. Usually, Harry didn't lock Hedwig in at night, but since he was going to Hogwarts today, he wanted to make sure she knew to fly to Hogwarts. She didn't often stay out all night, but he wasn't going to risk it.

Hedwig nibbled his fingers gently when he gave in and gave her a few owl treats with her mice and Harry pet her breast fondly. He had greatly missed his first friend these past few years and he was glad to have her back, even if she didn't remember him.

"We're going to Hogwarts today," Harry murmured to her, not worrying that any of the sleeping Dursleys would wake up and hear him talking to himself. One of the first things he'd done since getting his room was silencing it; he didn't know a lot of rune wards, but permanent and semi-permanent silencing wards were some of the few he knew by heart. They had come in handy during the hunt when he wanted a little privacy or didn't want Ron or Hermione to hear his screams; Voldemort had tortured him in his dreams and he had woken frequently from screaming himself hoarse. That was one of the reasons he'd put up the wards again, actually. He'd been having more nightmares in the past month than he'd had in the past six months, he was sure.

Harry turned away from Hedwig and pulled on a pair of joggers and one of Dudley's old tee's to run in. Just because he was going to Hogwarts today, that didn't mean that he could skip out on his exercise routine. It had been a constant in his life and it should erase some of his nerves for the train ride, at least. Or so he hoped.

Mischief dutifully followed him out of the house, silent as he had been when Harry had ordered him to steal the television remote. Harry set a brutal pace down Privet Drive before he turned to Wisteria Walk and then down Magnold road, taking the long way to the park instead of heading straight ahead. Mischief easily met his pace running beside him, not letting his collar and leash slow him down. Harry had transfigured the collar and leash from two rocks when a neighbour warned him that all dogs needed to be on a leash unless he wanted to be fined or have Mischief taken away.

The park was quiet when Harry passed through the gate, though he hadn't thought otherwise. It was seven in the morning on a Sunday, no kid would want to be out this early on the weekend. There weren't even any other joggers, leaving Harry to the peace of running to his own beat. In no time at all his breaths were coming out in heavy pants and his legs were beginning to ache. Harry may have been running these past two months, but it  _ had _ only been two months since he'd started exercising and he couldn't expect to be able to run long and hard for long, especially with the rough pace he was setting.

He only slowed down when the ache in his legs got to a cramp level and he walked back to Privet Drive with Mischief trailing along beside him. This would be the last time he would be able to enjoy a morning run outside with Mischief unless he wanted to get some odd looks from his classmates. Most wizards simply didn't run to build up stamina; only the Quidditch players and the Aurors did. He would have to change his running schedule to early mornings or late at night before curfew—or after curfew, it didn't really matter Harry knew how to not get caught and he had the advantage of Auror training and the experience of escaping Snatchers and bloody Voldemort himself for eight months—and he didn't want to risk getting Mischief confiscated.

The Dursleys were up and cooking breakfast by the time Harry returned from his run nearly an hour later. Cooking dinner had been one of the chores he'd wiggled his way out of. He'd only accepted to continue the rest of his chores—mainly the gardening and outside work—because he didn't want the Dursleys to get too furious at him and the labour was good for his body now that he was getting the proper nutrients to build muscle. While Harry would rather just skive off his chores, he knew that he would be spending at least a few weeks with the Dursleys each summer and he didn't want to be on bad terms with them. The Dursleys could get petty when they wanted to and Harry would rather not have to constantly cast spells at his relatives to make them docile and risk his abundant use of magic during the summers becoming suspicious.

Petunia, who was back to cooking breakfast now that he'd received his letter, merely gave him a sharp look and wrinkled her nose at him as he trotted up the stairs with Mischief trailing behind him. She wasn't particularly fond of animals and adjusting to the sudden presence of Mischief had caused Petunia to ignore her sudden fear of Harry and she'd nearly boxed him around the ears. Harry hadn't needed to defend himself because Mischief had done it for him. Petunia had stopped trying to hit him with frying pans after that and Vernon had gotten a healthy dose of fear when Mischief had nearly bitten him when he'd gone to hit Harry for "giving him attitude" or something like that. (Harry wasn't about to admit that he  _ had _ been giving Vernon attitude, but that was only because Vernon pissed him off to no end. He wasn't about to admit that their fear satisfied something deep inside him, something that wanted vengeance for the abuse he'd gone through.)

Rather than joining the Dursleys for breakfast, Harry merely showered and changed into an inconspicuous pair of jeans and a t-shirt before munching on the remaining food in his makeshift cooling cupboard; a sandwich that he'd made for this purpose. The Dursleys hadn't commented on his new clothes other than to say that he had better not stolen the money from them to buy them or that they better not get a visit from the cops saying that he'd stolen the clothes. Of course, they weren't worried about Harry, but for their own reputation on that one. Dudley had whined a fair bit, though, which had prompted a shopping trip to London that had left Harry locked outside for the day. He had merely glamoured himself and visited Diagon Alley for his last visit of the month. He'd bought some more food and another book or two to add to his collection.

By the time Harry finished eating his sandwich, there was an hour left to waste until the Dursleys were going to drive him to London. Harry had been unable to stop Hagrid from hexing Dudley without seeming too suspicious—though he silently warred with himself whether or not he had  _ wanted _ Dudley to get hexed again, his conscience battling with the pettiness inside him—and so they still had to get Dudley's tail removed.

He spent the rest of the morning double checking his trunk and making sure he had everything packed away. All of his school books and the other books he bought sat neatly on the bottom with his clothing and stationery sitting on top. His journal to Theo was spelled shut and he'd used a spell to cloak the writing so only he would be able to read it and the rest of his notes on the coming school years were packed into a magically sealed envelope with any and all variants of notice-me-not and cloaking spells on it, and even the pages themselves were charmed invisible. He wasn't about to risk someone going through his things and finding out everything about the coming years;  _ especially _ if they were a supporter of Voldemort.

Harry let Hedwig go right before he was due to leave and reluctantly froze Mischief with a spoken "Tah Grh"—which meant something like "Mischief Managed" in ancient Egyptian (well, if the Ancient Egyptian dictionary he'd picked up was correct, at any rate)—that shrunk him back into a small sculpture. The sight of the small black sculpture, still and lifeless, left him unsettled. He'd gotten used to Mischief and when Harry wasn't commanding him to be still, he was always moving in some way, almost like he had channelled some of Harry's restlessness.

Mischief was buried in a pile of clothes for safe-keeping despite the unbreakable charms on him and Harry locked his trunk shut before dragging it downstairs with ease. It had come with a featherweight charm included and could even levitate, though that feature wouldn't be used until he reached the platform. Petunia and Vernon were corralling Dudley into the car by the time he made it downstairs and he ignored their slightly hostile glares as he shoved his trunk in the boot. He knew that they had mixed feelings about him leaving; on one hand, they didn't want him attending the "freak" school and learning "freak" stuff, but on the other, they didn't want to live with him now that he had knowledge of his magic.  _ They also most likely don't want to deal with Dumbledore showing up, _ Harry tacked on as an afterthought.

The hour-long ride was a special type of hell, Harry thought. Vernon's company car wasn't small, but a rather decent-sized SUV, but with his relatives practically glaring at him, it certainly made the car seem small. Dudley at least had the sense not to mess with him, no doubt reminded of what magic was capable of considering he was about to get his pig tail cut off. Instead of staring out the window and trying to ignore his relatives' stares, Harry instead read an interesting book on Transfiguration he picked up and tried to ignore his relatives' stares.

They arrived at King's Cross at half-past ten and Uncle Vernon, instead of merely kicking him out and driving off, got out of his car, put Harry's trunk onto a cart, and wheeled it into the station for him. A vague memory of this happening Before hit Harry just as Vernon reared around with a nasty grin.

"Well, there you are, boy. Platform nine—platform ten. Your platform should be somewhere in the middle, but they don’t seem to have built it yet, do they?" Vernon leered.

Harry stared at him unamused. "The platform's magical," he said flatly, "because the school's magical."

Vernon's face purpled slightly and he glared at him. He looked like he wanted to wring Harry's neck, no doubt for some of the bullshit he'd pulled the last two months (it turned out that his pranks hadn't gone completely unnoticed), before he noticed a guard standing nearby who was watching them. He instead put on a forced smile and gestured to the platforms. "Have a good term,  _ boy _ ," he growled between clenched teeth.

"I will,  _ Uncle _ ," Harry said with a perfectly cheery smile that didn't look remotely fixed. Vernon's nostrils flared before he stomped back to the car and drove off. Harry stared after them a moment before there was a flicker of Weasley orange in the corner of his eye. He spun around and spotted the Weasleys. This hadn't really been something Harry had planned; running into them, that was. The Weasleys were something of a sore spot for him and he hadn't really interacted with them much in the past few years. Sure, he had often dropped by the shop to visit George in the first few months until he and Ron had a row about him "going dark" and he'd dropped out of the Auror academy to help George, and he'd often spoken to Bill about curse-breaking after his visit to Egypt, but he'd stopped going to the "family dinners" he had been invited to. He and Ginny had been at odds because of the way he'd dumped and quite literally left her (he did admit that leaving her in the Room had been rude of him) and he had simply felt odd around the grieving family, Ron in particular because he had been so  _ angry _ and their friendship was a bit broken by Ron leaving.

Instead of approaching the family, Harry merely watched them from afar. His chest tightened almost painfully at the sight of the twins as they ran through the wall between Platform 9 and Platform 10 together, leaving him feeling winded and like someone had taken his heart in their hand and had  _ pulled _ . He clenched his eyes shut and breathed in deeply to try and ease the feeling. It had been so long since he'd seen George carefree and joking around and just as long as he'd seen Fred with him. When he opened his eyes a few moments, the rest of the Weasleys had disappeared. He gave it another minute or two before passing through the platform himself, revealing the sight of the scarlet steam engine and families bustling around. The sight was like another punch to the gut; he hadn't expected to see the train again. He hadn't been one of the Aurors assigned to guard it after the war.

Pushing away the feeling with a headshake, Harry recalled the train car Theo said he would be sitting in and lugged his trunk over to it, easily hefting it up with the use of the levitating charm on it. It only took a few moments for Harry to search the compartments for Theo before he spotted him sitting in the back one, sat with an ankle over his knee and reading a book. He was absentmindedly stroking his tabby Obsidian who was now a kitten instead of the eight-year-old cat that he'd met Before. Theo looked up when he knocked on the window and he waved his newly-bought wand, disengaging the lock he had on the compartment.

"I'm Apparating next time," Harry grouched as a greeting, his trunk floating up on the rack with a twitch of his fingers. He flopped onto the bench across from Theo in an undignified manner and Theo raised an amused brow at him as he slid a bookmark into his book and put it to the side.

"Muggle transportation not good enough for you?" mused Theo as Obsidian took advantage of Theo's free lap for a warm place to nap.

"You try sitting in a small car with your aunt and uncle who have to get a magically-sprouted tail removed from their son," Harry said and there was a glimmer of dark amusement in Theo's eyes at his statement. Theo might not hold the same regards about Muggles or Muggleborns like the more traditional purebloods did, though he certainly had no qualms finding amusement out of the fact that Hagrid had hexed his Muggle cousin to have a pig's tail.

"I can't believe you let him do that," Theo commented. Harry opened his mouth to protest and Theo immediately shot him down with a lifted brow. Okay, so  _ maybe _ he hadn't put as much effort into stopping Hagrid from giving Dudley a tail as he should have.

"Hey, I'd just found out about magic, what was I supposed to do?" Harry said with wide, innocent eyes. Theo just smirked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the chapter and please tell me what you thought and any questions you've got!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes over a lot of the train ride. Most of the dialogue was taken from _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ but some of it I changed. A few of the events differs from what happened in the book.

Harry and Theo chatted some about how the Houses may perceive Harry and discussed whether or not they should out themselves as friends early on. Harry figured that there was no harm in saying that he'd met Theo while visiting Diagon Alley and that Theo had offered to give him a wizard's introduction into the world and that they'd continued to write during the summer. It certainly wasn't a lie, at any rate, because Harry and Theo had written letters to each other.

Theo's father might have ended up finding out that Theo formed a quick friendship with him at school, and so they'd come up with the idea to write letters to each other, pretending that Harry didn't know much about the wizarding world and that Theo was giving him tips. From what Harry had heard from Theo when they spoke through their journals, Theo's father hadn't taken their budding friendship too badly. He hadn't been thrilled that the politically powerful person Theo had befriended was the Boy-Who-Lived, at any rate, but he approved that Theo was already seeking out allies before school even started.

Their conversation had just moved onto other things—such as what projects they'd completed—when there was a knock on their compartment door. Harry turned from where he was making wide hand gestures while describing how he'd enchanted Mischief and blinked at the person standing outside the compartment door. As if their sudden attention was a "Come in," Ron slid the door open and peered in nervously.

"Anyone sitting there?" he asked, gesturing to the empty seat next to him, "Everywhere else is full."

Harry traded glances with Theo. They hadn't planned on sharing their train compartment with anyone, _especially_ Ron Weasley, but Harry didn't have the heart to turn Ron away. This eleven-year-old had been his friend once, and he'd been a very good one at that. Theo tilted his head in a way that told Harry he didn't mind and so he shook his head.

"No, go ahead," said Harry. Ron shuffled in and closed the door before him, settling beside Harry but not before eyeing Obsidian. The kitten was lying lazily on Theo's lap, purring as Theo stroked her back.

"She's not big enough to chase rats, is she?" asked Ron, holding his hand protectively around one of his pockets. Harry's eyes shot to the pocket and he just about managed to stop himself from tensing visibly. _Pettigrew_ , he mentally hissed before the guilt overcame him. Here he was, sitting on the train going to Hogwarts and practically overjoyed at being back in time, and Sirius was rotting in Azkaban while that _rat_ played house with a bunch of wizards.

"You've got a pet rat?" Harry managed to spit out, his voice sounding somewhat strained. Ron shuffled a bit in his seat and his ears turned red in embarrassment. He took in his and Theo's clothes; Theo was dressed in his usual everyday wear—a button-down and a pair of slacks—and while Harry was dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans like Ron, it was clear that his clothing was new and fit him properly, unlike Ron's which were patched and frayed and hung off his frame in some places while being too short in others.

"Er, yeah," said Ron, pulling an old, fat, sleeping rat out of his pocket. "He's been in the family a while, Scabbers. Used to be my brother's before he became prefect and Mum and Dad got him an owl. They gave him to me so I'd have a pet." Harry and Theo met each other's eyes and Harry gave a small nod, telling Theo that this was Pettigrew.

"He seems useless," said Theo, his voice dripping with barely contained disdain as he looked at the old, fat rat. There was something sharp in Theo's eyes as he looked upon the Animagus with disgust. Harry knew, from Theo's earlier comments on Pettigrew, that it was because the rat was nothing but a snivelling coward who'd rather betray his best friends rather than stand up for them. Harry felt the same.

"Yeah," Ron mumbled with reddened ears. "All he does is sleep."

Their conversation after that became a little stilted until Harry got Ron talking about Quidditch, allowing him to explain it to him. Theo surprisingly chimed in, explaining to Harry why he hadn't really gone over Quidditch much in their letters. He was lying down more groundwork to make it more believable that he and Harry had conversed over the summer, Harry realized, and Harry discussed a few of the things that Theo had told him about in their letters, allowing Ron to tell him more about some points than others.

They were talking about their classes in Hogwarts—Ron was surprisingly excited about their upcoming lessons, having heard about them from his elder brothers, though he was nervous because of his hand-me-down books and wand and he wasn't looking forward to the homework—when the witch with the trolley came by at half-past twelve.

"Anything off the cart, dears?" the witch said with a dimpled smile after sliding open their door. Harry, who had strongly missed wizarding treats the past few months, eagerly lept to his feet and purchased a wide variety of sweets—chocolate frogs, pumpkin pasties, cauldron cakes, and Theo's favourite, Roasted Chimera potato crisps—before turning to Ron, who had reluctantly pulled out his somewhat soggy corned beef sandwiches.

"Do you want anything?" Harry asked him, lifting up a chocolate frog.

"My mum gave me sandwiches, thanks," said Ron miserably. Harry shrugged and bought a few chocolate frogs and sugar quills for him anyway, as well as some butterbeer and some bottled pumpkin juice for them to drink. He handed the trolley witch two Galleons, not bothering for the change and dropped his bounty next to Theo before tossing him a bag of crisps.

Theo raised a brow. "You remembered." Harry just shrugged and grabbed some cauldron cakes and a butterbeer for himself before looking at Ron and nodding to the pile of sweets.

"Go ahead, have some," said Harry. "I bought some of everything since I haven't had any wizarding sweets before."

After a few moments, Ron grabbed a few chocolate frogs and some sugar quills, and when he didn't grab a drink, Harry rolled his eyes and shoved a bottle of butterbeer at him. "They taste great," said Harry, sipping at his own bottle. He grabbed a few of the extras he bought and shoved them in his trunk for later. He wasn't going to risk sneaking down to Hogsmeade and getting caught; while he may actually look his age now, he wasn't about to go strolling in Hogsmeade, even if he knew how to use glamours. It was a small village where everyone knew everyone so someone would surely think something was odd if a random kid no one recognized appeared.

They worked at the pile of treats in peace; Ron was staring out the window in boredom, Theo was reading the book he'd set to the side when Harry came in, and Harry was reading the Transfiguration book he'd been reading earlier in the car. It went over animations more in-depth, which Harry figured would be fun to play around with when he got bored with first-year stuff. What if he created a lot of little statues to play around with? It would be hilarious if he picked up a tarantula or a rat figurine and animated it to run around the Dursleys, he mused.

Harry had always been a little mischievous, which he now knew came from his dad. He had just never really done anything mischievous other than the comments he made to Dudley when out of earshot of his aunt and uncle. He could still remember the comment he made about not wanting to practice doing swirlies with Dudley because the toilet might get sick with Dudley's head down it.

For a moment, he wondered what it would be like to take up the mantle of Prongs—well, Pronglet if Harry was using Sirius's nickname for him—and how the teachers at Hogwarts would react. He'd be just like his father, running around and playing tricks, and Harry found that he really didn't want that. Oh, he wouldn't mind having fun here and there, but he didn't want to be seen as a carbon copy of his father. Sure, he looked very much like James Potter—though his eyes, lips, chin, and the freckles across his nose and forehead was all Lily Evans—but he _wasn't_ James Potter.

James Potter had been the son of the elderly Charlus Potter and Dorea Black, who had doted heavily on him. He'd been a spoiled child and a miscreant, playing tricks and pranks on others and taking his frustrations on kids he didn't like. He'd also been a prodigy at Transfiguration and a good student, and later on, a very good man who'd sacrificed himself for the lives of his wife and child.

He also wasn't exactly like his mother. He had her eyes, sure, and her talent in Charms (Transfiguration was something he excelled at, as well), and he definitely shared her protective streak, but he was also dark and twisted. He practised darker magics and he enjoyed it and he'd killed people. Hell, the first time he'd killed anyone was when he was eleven.

Harry looked down and fiddled with a page on his book at the thoughts whirling through his mind. Perhaps, perhaps he didn't have to be like his parents. He was similar to them in many ways, yeah, but he didn't have to be like them for the sake of being like them. If he wanted to play pranks on someone, then that was because he wanted to. Not because it made him like his father.

Harry shook his head slightly and looked out the window to gauge the time. The neat fields that they had passed earlier when the trolley lady came in had gone, and instead in its place were wild clearings and forests not far off from the train. The sun was still above the copse of trees, and from five years of Astronomy, Harry was able to tell that it was probably around three or four in the afternoon. If it had just been him and Theo in the compartment, he would have used the time spell he created, but as it was he didn't want to reveal his amount of magical knowledge to Ron.

There was a knock on the door not long after Harry got bored of watching the scenery and he instead turned towards his Transfiguration book. He was about a quarter of the way through it and he was on a chapter about animating armour, much like how McGonagall had charmed the armour in the battle at Hogwarts. An image on the page kept cycling through the wand movement of the spell and then a set of armour springing to life.

A round-faced, blonde boy peered through the door and it took Harry a moment to recognize him to be Neville. Gone was the fit, confident man Harry had taken to visiting on his days off (they often swapped knowledge over a pint of beer in the Leaky Cauldron, where Neville had begun working with his fiance Hannah during his Herbology internship), and instead in his place was a short, plump boy who was teary-eyed and nervous-looking.

"Sorry," he said at interrupting them, "but have you seen a toad at all?"

Harry shook his head with Ron and Theo and Neville wailed, "I've lost him! He keeps getting away from me!"

This was an event that Harry had forgotten about, though he certainly hadn't forgotten about the elusive Trevor. The toad had been legendary in the Gryffindor boys' dorm room for getting lost and turning up in odd spots and places. Harry had once woken in the middle of the night to visit the loo and had nearly jumped out of his skin when Trevor had croaked at him mid-pee from his spot in the sink.

"Maybe you could find a prefect?" Harry suggested. "They should know summoning spells."

Neville looked dumbfounded. "Oh, I hadn't thought of that…" he said. "There are no mentions of summoning spells in our textbooks."

Harry shrugged. "I heard about it in one of the extra books I picked up. It said that it should work on animals."

"I guess I'll go find a prefect, thank you…" said Neville before leaving.

"Don't know why he's so bothered," said Ron with a wrinkled nose. "If I'd brought a toad, I'd lose it as quickly as I could. Mind you, I brought Scabbers, so I can't talk." Harry eyed the rat, who was currently snoozing on Ron's lap, with thinly-veiled disgust. He wondered if Pettigrew _liked_ being treated like a pet.

"He might have died and you wouldn't know the difference," continued Ron, disgust clear in his voice as he poked the Rat's fat rump. "I tried to turn him yellow yesterday to make him more interesting, but the spell didn't work. I'll show you, look…"

Harry watched in amusement as Ron rummaged around in his trunk and pulled out an old, battered-looking wand. The wood was chipped in places and a crack ran up the tip, revealing a hint of white.

"Unicorn hair's nearly poking out," said Ron in embarrassment before continuing, "Anyway—"

Ron had just raised his wand and pointed it at Pettigrew when the compartment door was pushed open without so much as a knock. Neville was standing nervously behind Hermione, who was standing in their door bossily. She had already dressed in her brand new Hogwarts robes, which Harry recognized to be of the higher quality robes in Madam Malkin's.

"Has anyone seen a toad? Neville's lost one," Hermione said, her tone as bossy as Harry remembered it to me. Her hair was no longer glossy and tied up like the last time Harry had seen her, and it was instead very frizzy and bushy, and when she spoke, Harry could see her large front teeth. He made a mental note to see if he could subtly hit her with a hex to grow them, if only to have Madam Pomfrey make them smaller. Harry may not intend on being good friends with Hermione this time around, but that didn't mean that he couldn't help her a little.

Harry raised a brow at Neville, who was looking at them and Hermione in embarrassment. Out of this and Hermione's body language, Harry surmised that Hermione had bowled over whatever Neville must have told, as Harry could remember her doing when they were younger. She only got marginally better after a few years of friendship.

"We already told him that a prefect could summon it," Ron was telling Hermione, but Hermione's eyes had locked onto Ron's wand and she wasn't listening.

"Oh, are you doing magic? Let's see it, then," said Hermione, plopping down next to Theo. Theo, for his credit, was looking at Hermione in a mixture of amusement and curiosity. He had already closed his book to watch the free entertainment and Harry gave him narrowed eyes. Theo merely inclined his head toward Hermione, who was looking at a taken aback Ron expectantly. Neville was still hovering by the door, though he was looking at Ron curiously.

"Er—all right," said Ron, clearing his throat. " _Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow; Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow._ " He waved his wand gallantly at Pettigrew, but nothing happened.

“Are you sure that’s a _real_ spell?” said Hermione with a wrinkle in her nose. “Well, it’s not very good, is it? I’ve tried a few simple spells just for practice and it’s all worked for me. Nobody in my family’s magic at all, it was ever such a surprise when I got my letter, but I was ever so pleased, of course, I mean, it’s the _very best_ school of witchcraft there is, I’ve heard—I’ve learned all our course books by heart, of course, I just hope it will be enough—I’m Hermione Granger, by the way, who are you?”

Hermione, as Harry knew she would, had said this all very fast. Ron was looking at her gobsmacked—either at the fast speech or the fact that Hermione claimed to have read all of their school books already, he didn't know—and Theo was still watching her in amusement.

"I'm Ron Weasley," Ron muttered.

"Harry Potter," Harry introduced himself. Two pairs of eyes stared at him before Theo could introduce himself, though he was too busy watching the show to care, probably.

"Are you really?" Ron and Hermione said at once; Ron looking even more gobsmacked than before and Hermione merely looking interested. Harry blinked at Ron's expression before he realized that he'd forgotten that he hadn't even introduced himself to Ron when he'd come in. He'd already known Ron's name from Before and Ron hadn't bothered to ask him.

" _You're_ Harry Potter?" Ron gaped. He was clearly surprised that the guy he'd been sharing candy with was _the_ Harry Potter. "Do you—Do you have the you know?" His voice dropped to a whisper. " _The scar_?"

"Yes…" said Harry reluctantly, not really feeling like showing off his scar. He was no longer ashamed of his scar and hadn't bothered to hide it after the war since it had faded, but that didn't mean that he wanted to show it off like some circus freak. Neville, who still stood by the door, was gaping at him in surprise.

"Nevermind that," Hermione cut him off and then said presumptuously, “I know all about you, of course—I got a few extra books for background reading, and you’re in _Modern Magical History_ and _The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_ and _Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century_.”

“Am I?” said Harry flatly. He hadn't necessarily forgotten about that fact, he just hadn't bothered to care. Now, though, he found it really irritating that Hermione just assumed that she knew all about him. Before he could address the issue, she was off again.

“Goodness, didn’t you know? I’d have found out everything I could if it was me,” said Hermione. “Do either of you know what House you’ll be in? I’ve been asking around, and I hope I’m in Gryffindor, it sounds by far the best—" Theo looked like he wanted to snort at that. "—I hear Dumbledore himself was in it, but I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn’t be too bad… Anyway, we’d better go and look for Neville’s toad. You two had better change, you know, I expect we’ll be there soon.”

And she was gone before Harry could say anything to her, taking a still gaping Neville with her.

"She's rather presumptuous, don't you think?" said Theo, turning to raise a brow at Harry. Harry made a face at Theo; he didn't particularly feel like defending his past friendship with the girl. Hermione had been a good friend of his and they'd continued to talk sometimes even after they'd drifted apart. She hadn't been as adverse to his learning Dark Arts than Ron since she'd done some pretty dark stuff herself (keeping a certain witch locked inside a jar came to mind).

“Whatever House I’m in, I hope she’s not in it,” said Ron with a scowl. He threw his wand back into his trunk. “Stupid spell—George gave it to me, bet he knew it was a dud.”

“What House are your brothers in?” asked Harry even though he already knew.

“Gryffindor,” said Ron. He became miserable again. “Mum and Dad were in it, too. I don’t know what they’ll say if I’m not. I don’t suppose Ravenclaw would be too bad, but imagine if they put me in Slytherin.”

"What's wrong with Slytherin?" Theo asked sharply, having gotten over his amusement at the earlier events. Ron blinked up at him as if he'd forgotten Theo was even there. Harry didn't blame him. Theo was extremely quiet.

"Oh, well, nothing, I suppose. It's just, my mum's always going on about how all of these dark wizards were in—including You-Know-Who—and my whole family's been in Gryffindor," said Ron with a slightly depressed frown. Harry was actually a little surprised that Mr Weasley hadn't been mentioned. His rivalry with the Malfoy patriarch—who was as Slytherin as they came—was notorious.

"Your dad's not against Slytherin?" said Harry.

"I don't think so, no," said Ron with a shake of his head. "Other than not liking the Malfoys, my dad doesn't mind Slytherins, I don't think. His mum, my gran, is a Slytherin, actually. Cedrella Black."

Harry looked at Ron in surprise before glancing at Theo with a look that said _Did you know that?_ Theo raised a brow at him and nodded. _Later_ , Theo mouthed. Harry nodded at him before turning back to Ron, who hadn't noticed their exchange.

"My dad's mom was a Black, too," said Harry. It was something that he'd read not long after learning that his family was related to the Peverells. Harry had flipped through the book _Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy_ and had read as much as he could about the Potters. When he had learned that he was actually blood-related to Sirius—they were second cousins—instead of just godson and godfather, it had felt like a punch to the gut. That he'd gotten another blood-related family member killed.

"I'm not surprised," commented Ron. "A lot of the old pureblood families are related, especially to the Blacks."

Harry looked over at Theo, wondering if he was related to the Blacks, too. "The Notts don't have any recent relations with the Blacks," Theo answered his silent question before he nodded toward Ron, "but my great uncle was a Weasley."

This surprised Harry somewhat. Considering that the Notts were a Dark and traditional family, he figured that they wouldn't want to marry the Weasleys. The Weasleys were a traditionally Light family, Muggle-supporters, and currently very poor. Though, Harry figured, considering that the Weasleys were a part of the _Pure-Blood Directory_ (also known as the Sacred Twenty-Eight)—which Theo told Harry had been written by his father's cousin Cantankerous Nott in the thirties—that the Weasleys mustn't have always been poor. It must have been a recent development.

Ron continued to talk a little about his family, and when prompted, Harry grudgingly talked about his aunt and uncle and cousin. He didn't share much about them, though, simply saying that they were Muggles who didn't approve of the fact that he was a wizard. Ron thought it was weird that Harry had lived with Muggles for most of his life, especially since he was the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry merely shrugged and said that he was probably given to them because they were his closest relatives (and that was the truth, too). They had moved onto talking about Quidditch—a topic which extended off Ron talking about his numerous broom-talented siblings—when the compartment door slid open yet again.

Harry had been anticipating this visit. Draco Malfoy, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle (though Harry hadn't known Crabbe, and thought that he was somewhat of an idiot, it was nice to see him alive), strutted into the corridor.

"Hello, Malfoy," said Harry pleasantly. As Harry had known a little about the wizarding world when they met, he hadn't made a fool of himself in front of the other boy. In fact, he'd been pleasant with Draco since he knew that they would be in the same House for the next seven or so years, though he had gotten annoyed when Draco bad-mouthed Hagrid again. They may have been friendly in the future (though they certainly weren't friends), but an eleven-year-old Draco was still incredibly annoying.

"Potter," Draco greeted before his eyes fell on Harry's compartment companions. "Nott," he then nodded at Theo, who nodded back. Draco's eyes then slid to Weasley and his lip was beginning to curl.

"This is Ron Weasley," Harry introduced the red-haired boy before Draco could say something stupid. "Ron, this is Draco. I met him when I went shopping in Diagon Alley. Who're your friends, Malfoy?"

"This is Crabbe and Goyle," Draco introduced his two bodyguards with a bit of distaste in his tone. (Theo had actually explained that the two actually were Draco's bodyguards. They were vassals, of sorts, which meant that their families worked for the Malfoys.) Ron and Draco were eyeing one another with dislike and Harry looked at Theo with exasperation. Theo merely raised a brow, silently telling him _You're the one who made friends with the two of them, you can stop them from fighting_.

"We were just talking about Quidditch, Malfoy," said Harry. "You said you liked Quidditch, back in Madam Malkin's, didn't you?"

"Yes…" Draco trailed off, his lips pursing in a manner much like Petunia. _It's like pulling teeth_ , Harry thought, ignoring the urge to scowl.

Crabbe and Goyle were eyeing up the small pile of sweets next to Theo, who had gone back to reading his book. He had managed to get about two-thirds of the way through it during the train ride despite all of the distractions so far.

"You can have some sweets," Harry told them. "I think I bought too many. I wasn't allowed to have many sweets at home." _Or any at all, rather._

"That's horrible," said Malfoy as he grabbed a sugar quill and sat down next to Theo where Hermione had sat earlier. "My parents allow me to have all sorts of sweets at home, though my mother can get a bit annoyed if I have too many. The house-elves make the best éclairs."

"My mum makes really good home-made fudge and toffee," said Ron, though the comment sounded grudging. Harry smiled slightly at the memory of Mrs Weasley's home-made fudge and toffee, and something in him twinged at the thought that he'd never get to have any again. He wasn't planning on befriending Ron this time since he didn't want to get him involved with Voldemort, and that meant distancing himself from the rest of the Weasleys. Even though Harry hadn't visited the Weasleys in a while, Mrs Weasley had still dutifully sent him treats. The last time he'd had her toffee had been during Easter when Mrs Weasley had sent him her legendary Easter dragon eggs full of toffee.

Harry nibbled on the end of a sugar quill and watched in amusement as Ron and Draco tried to one-up one another on whose parents and-or house-elves made the best sweets. It was about half an hour later when the compartment door slid open again, revealing Hermione. She looked in on them with a wrinkled nose, particularly Crabbe and Goyle who had some chocolate smudged on their lips.

"You'd better hurry up and put your robes on," she said bossily. "I've just been up to the front to ask the conductor and he says we're nearly there."

Harry twitched slightly in annoyance. This had to be what? The fifth time someone's barged in on his compartment.

"Thanks," said Harry and the bossy girl left. Harry could hear her opening the other compartment doors and informing them that they should get dressed.

"She must be a Muggleborn," Draco sniffed once Hermione was gone. "She shouldn't be talking to you that way, Potter."

"She was a little rude," Harry admitted before he directed his next question and him, Crabbe, and Goyle. "Would you three mind standing out in the hallway? There isn't enough space to get dressed with all of us in here and you're already dressed."

Thankfully, the three of them left without a fuss, though Crabbe and Goyle shove a few pastries in their pockets. Harry ignored it and closed the blinds on the compartment before grabbing his robes from his trunk. Theo had already slid his robe on and buttoned it and Ron was struggling to pull his over his ears. Harry pulled on one of his new robes and buttoned it to hide his Muggle-style clothing. He would have changed into a pair of slacks if it had just been him and Theo, but Ron was here, too, and he wasn't about to undress without an explanation.

Draco looked at him appraisingly when he was let back in the compartment and he nodded in something like approval, which Harry figured was at his choice in robes.

 _"We will be reaching Hogwarts in five minutes' time. Please leave your luggage on the train, it will be taken to the school separately,"_ a voice echoed through the train then. Harry's stomach lurched with nerves though he spent the final five minutes making sure all of his stuff was packed up. Theo managed to corral Obsidian into her cage and Ron stuffed Pettigrew back into his pocket. Draco had left to his own compartment, though not before he snagged a few sugar quills and a chocolate frog, along with Crabbe and Goyle. Harry shoved the last of his cauldron cakes into his trunk just as the train slid to a stop.

Bumbling through the corridors with the rest of the students, Harry just about remembered to cast a warming spell on his robes right before a gust of chilly night air blew right at him. He huddled into his cloak and followed Theo toward Hagrid, who was bellowing, "Firs' years! Firs' years over here!" with a lantern raised in the air to provide a sort of beacon for all of the eleven-year-olds.

Hagrid managed to spot him and he beamed at him over the sea of heads. "C'mon, follow me—any more firs' years? Mind yer step, now! Firs' years, follow me!"

Harry stumbled slightly down the steep, wet path, all of his senses feeling dimmed. Magic was thick and heavy in the air and he wasn't even close to the castle yet. There was the excited and nervous churning of magic on the surface from the other first years, though below that was the thick, heavy feel of old magic that swirled around the grounds almost lazily. It made him feel like he had a weight on his chest and it made the hair on his arms rise.

"You all right?" Theo murmured from next to him, feeling as hushed as the rest of the first-years.

"The magic…" Harry trailed off, not able to even describe the feeling. Beside him, Harry just about managed to catch Theo's nod, and Harry didn't doubt that he felt something similar. Harry swallowed and did his best to pull in his magic to make the feeling less intense.

"Yeh'll get yer firs' sight o' Hogwarts in a sec," Hagrid called out to them all, his voice loud in the hushed silence, "jus' round this bend here."

The narrow path that they had been walking down opened suddenly onto the edge of the Black Lake. Hogwarts sat regally on a cliff high above the lake, her many turrets and towers blocking the stars and her large arching Tudor windows sparkling with a bright yellow glow.

There was a loud, " _Oooooh!_ " as everyone caught sight of the castle and Harry felt his breath leave him. He hadn't been able to convince himself to visit the castle after he'd help put it back together, too haunted by the many memories there. The sight of the castle, complete and whole, took his breath. The sight of it was absolutely beautiful and for a moment, he feared that the memories of fear and death in its halls would ruin the sight, but it didn't. Instead, he was reminded of the first time he saw the castle, and it was just as breathtaking.

"No more'n four to a boat!" Hagrid called as he pointed to all of the little boats sitting in the water by the shore. Harry and Theo seated themselves in one of the boats and Ron, who had been following them, joined them. No one else sat in their boat and not long after Hagrid shouted, "Everyone in? Right then—FORWARD!"

The boats moved forward all at once, gliding smoothing across the lake. Harry could feel the magic in the boats activate with Hagrid's command, even with his magic dimmed, and recognized the spell to be a sort of charm though he didn't put too much effort into identifying it. He was too busy staring silently up at the castle, which grew as they approached. They sailed nearer and nearer to the cliff it sat on before Hagrid yelled, "Heads down!" right before the boats carried them into a dark tunnel behind a curtain of ivy.

Harry had nearly forgotten about this. The underground harbour in the lake wasn't accessible to students and Fred and George had been unable to find a way to access it. Harry figured that Dumbledore had personally charmed the door that hid the tunnel.

Harry clambered out of the boat when it pulled to a stop and he offered a hand to both Theo and Ron, the latter of which stumbled over some loose pebbles. It wasn't long until they were heading through the tunnel, though that was not until Hagrid handed Neville his toad. They exited in a passageway on the side of the castle, which was right beside the flight of stone steps that led to the massive, oak front doors.

"Everyone here?" Hagrid said before calling out to Neville, "You there, still got yer toad?" He then lifted a gigantic fist and knocked three times on the castle door.

It swung open immediately, revealing a tall, black-haired witch in emerald-green robes. Harry immediately recognized this to be Professor McGonagall, though she looked much younger than when he had last seen her. Her hair had been streaked with grey then, but now only a few hairs of grey peppered her tightly coiled bun.

McGonagall looked over at them very sternly as Hagrid said, "The firs' years, Professor McGonagall."

"Thank you, Hagrid. I will take them from here," said McGonagall before she pulled the door open further. It revealed the welcome sight of the entrance hall, which was lit with brightly flaming torches and had a magnificent marble staircase which led to the upper floors. McGonagall led them across the flagged stone floor and into the atrium which Harry had entered after his name had been called from the Goblet of Fire.

Hundreds of voices buzzed from behind the Great Hall doors, matching the buzzing of magic Harry felt. It was still nearly overwhelming, far more than it had felt when he'd stood outside the castle. He closed his eyes slightly as everyone crowded together in the chamber, trying to get used to the magic that was imbued in the castle walls from over a thousand years of housing magical students.

"Welcome to Hogwarts," said McGonagall, making him open his eyes to pay attention to her. "The start-of-term banquet will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you will be Sorted into your Houses. The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your House will be something like your family within Hogwarts. You will have classes with the rest of your House, sleep in your House dormitory, and spend free time in your House common room.

“The four Houses are called Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. Each House has its own noble history and each has produced outstanding witches and wizards. While you are at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn your House points, while any rule-breaking will lose House points. At the end of the year, the House with the most points is awarded the House Cup, a great honour. I hope each of you will be a credit to whichever House becomes yours.

“The Sorting Ceremony will take place in a few minutes in front of the rest of the school. I suggest you all smarten yourselves up as much as you can while you are waiting," finished McGonagall, whose eyes lingered on Neville's cloak, which was fastened under his left ear, and on the dirt smudged on Ron's nose. Harry felt slightly insecure, knowing he was still slightly scrawny, though he didn't bother to try and flatten his hair. Before he'd left the Dursleys, he'd done all possible to try and make his hair look presentable, though all he'd managed to do was give his hair a windswept, sexed-up style, which shouldn't be on an eleven-year-old. It was the best that he could manage, however.

As all of the nervous first-years chattered nervously to one another on the Sorting Ceremony (Harry could hear Ron talking to Seamus about what type of test they might have to take while Hermione was whispering various spells under her breath), Harry stood silently beside Theo and tried to calm his nerves. He was annoyingly nervous and wished that he'd brought a Calming Draught with him. His thoughts whirled around what everyone would think of him being Sorted into Slytherin and what their reactions would be. It had his stomach clenching and he fisted his sweaty hands in his pockets.

"You'll be fine," Theo murmured. Harry looked over at him and realized that Theo was also nervous. You wouldn't be able to tell with his cool and collected attitude, but the way his silver-blue eyes flickered around belied his nerves.

Harry sucked in a deep breath and let it out, running a hand through his hair to try and fix it a bit more before nodding. "Thank you," he said before startling as several people behind him let out shrill screams. It made his already nervous heart set a rabbit's pace and he whirled around, his wand flicking into his hand without a second's thought.

It was just the ghosts.

" _Merlin_ ," Harry said with a breathy, hysterical laugh, shoving his wand back into its holster. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Theo doing the same.

About twenty ghosts had drifted through the back wall, as pearly-white and as slightly-transparent as Harry remembered them to be. They were talking among themselves, not sparing a second's thought towards all of the screaming children in the antechamber.

"Forgive and forget, I say, we ought to give him a second chance—" the Fat Friar was saying.

"My dear Friar, haven't we given Peeves all the chances he deserves? He gives us all a bad name and you know, he's not really even a ghost—I say, what are you all doing here?" Nearly Headless Nick said, suddenly spotting them all. Nobody answered him.

"New students!" cheered the Fat Friar, smiling joyfully at him. "About to be Sorted, I suppose?" A few people nodded. "Hope to see you in Hufflepuff! My old House, you know."

"Move along now," McGonagall said sharply, having slipped through the door leading to the Great Hall while everyone's attention had been on the ghosts. "The Sorting Ceremony is about to start." The ghosts faded through the walls one by one and McGonagall said to them all, "Now, form a line and follow me."

All of the first years did as told and Harry was sandwiched between Theo and Seamus as they followed McGonagall out into the Great Hall. It was just as magnificent as Harry remembered it to be but his hands trembled slightly as flashes of the dead lying in the hall flashed across his vision and the memory of his red Expelliarmus and Voldemort's Avada Kedavra connecting before Voldemort fell, dead. Theo, who stood behind him, brushed his hand against Harry's arm, making him jump.

"Calm down," Theo said, having no doubt spotted the trembling of his hands and the tightness of his shoulders. Theo then murmured a spell under his breath, which made Harry take in a deep breath, the panic abiding. He blinked a few times and recognized it to be a sobering charm. Apparently, those worked on panic attacks.

"Thank you," said Harry, swallowing and looking up at the large inky expanse of the charmed ceiling. Somewhere behind him, he heard Hermione whispering about how the ceiling was bewitched to look like the sky outside, which she'd read about in _Hogwarts: A History_.

They halted not long after and Professor silently placed a four-legged stool in front of the head table. She then placed down the Sorting Hat, which twitched and ripped open to sing. As far as Harry could remember, the song was just as he remembered it to be, and then the whole hall burst into applause as it bowed and stilled again.

"So we've just got to try on the hat!" Harry heard Ron whisper to Seamus. "I'll kill Fred, he was going on about wrestling a troll."

Harry clenched and unclenched his hands and employed the same breathing techniques for Occlumency to try and calm himself as McGonagall pulled out a long roll of parchment and began to call out peoples' names.

Hannah Abbot and Susan Bones became Hufflepuffs, Terry Boot and Mandy Brocklehurst became Ravenclaws, Lavender Brown became the first Gryffindor. Then came Millicent Bulstrode, the first Slytherin, who didn't look as ugly as his eleven-year-old self had originally thought. In fact, she looked rather average for an eleven-year-old, if not a little plump. Justin Finch-Fletchley joined the Puffs and Seamus Finnigan joined the lions again. Soon it was Hermione's turn and it took a full three minutes, in which Hermione looked to be whispering furiously under her breath, to be Sorted in Gryffindor once more. Harry heard Ron groan.

It was Neville's turn soon after, and Harry was confident that Neville would be a Gryffindor once more. He could clearly remember when his friend had bravely stood before Voldemort, pulled the Sword of Gryffindor from the Sorting Hat, and slain Voldemort's last Horcrux and pet snake before him. It took a full seven minutes, a hatstall, before the Hat shouted, "Gryffindor!" and Neville took off with the Hat on his head once more.

Morag MacDougal joined the Ravenclaws and Malfoy swaggered forward and got Sorted into Slytherin almost immediately before he sat by Crabbe and Goyle, who'd been Sorted into Slytherin again earlier. Lily Moon joined Millicent Bulstrode, Tracey Davis, and Daphne Greengrass as a female Slytherin before it was Theo's turn.

Theo slid easily out of line and walked toward the stole, his gait smooth and confident before he sat on the stool. The Hat slid under his eyes, and after several heart-thudding moments, Theo joined Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy at the Slytherin table. His eyes slid towards Harry's as he sat down and Harry gave him a thumbs up. Pansy Parkinson also joined the Slytherin first-years and after the Patil twins were Sorted into Gryffindor and Ravenclaw and Sally-Anne Perks was Sorted into Gryffindor, it was Harry's turn.

"Potter, Harry!" called McGonagall in a clear, crisp voice, though Harry could just about hear a waver in it in the beginning.

The previously silent hall burst into hiss-like whispers as Harry straightened and stepped confidently towards the Sorting Hat.

" _Potter_ , did she say?"

" _The_ Harry Potter?"

"Potter's _here_?"

The whispers carried on as Harry hopped up on the stool. The last thing Harry saw before the brim of the Sorting Hat dropped over his eyes were hundreds of eyes peering up at him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend for it to take me two weeks to get a new chapter, so I apologise for that! I've just been feeling down mentally for a while and I needed a little break from writing for a bit. This chapter wasn't really what I hoped for it to be (I had intended for it to be longer), so I've got the idea to tack it onto the end of the previous chapter. Let me know your thoughts on that!

The hushed whispers seemed to dim as the Sorting Hat fell over his eyes and ears. The magic in the Hat swirled around his head and Harry could practically feel invisible fingers prodding at his mind, sliding through his Occlumency barriers with ease.

 _"Ah, the second time traveller,"_ said the Hat into his mind with a chuckle.

 _Theo told you?_ Harry thought to the Hat. This hadn't actually been something that they'd discussed. They'd overlooked—more like forgotten—the fact that the Sorting Hat looked through your mind to Sort you. They really should have planned for the Hat's input.

 _"Yes, yes, the Nott boy. It was all in his head. And such a brilliant and creative mind he has, and if not for his cunning and ambition, he would do brilliant in Ravenclaw,"_ said the Hat. _"But we are not here to talk about your friend, we are here to talk about **you** , Mr Potter."_

Harry felt a slight twinge of concern. What if he was put in somewhere other than Slytherin? Half of the plans he and Theo made didn't revolve around being in a certain House, but Harry would have a distinct advantage if he was in Slytherin. The way they did things, such as their underground network of favours and turning a blind eye to certain things (such as owning illegal books or artefacts), would help him greatly. If he accumulated favours (and he certainly intended to), then it would make it much easier for him to get certain books than he otherwise wouldn't have been able to gather, amongst other things. Numerous students in Slytherin were in particularly affluent families who had libraries that were no doubt chock-full of old, unattainable books. A few bits of information here and some illegal Potions ingredients there…

The Hat let out another chuckle. _"Such a ready mind you have, and terribly clever, too,"_ the Hat said. Harry felt the fingers card through his memories again before the Hat said, _"Your mind is teeming with knowledge; you soak it up like a sponge, I see. And talent—oh goodness, the talent! Hmm… your loyalty and bravery, you have that in spades, but your cunning, your ambition, and your thirst to prove yourself, oh yes… You don't want to be seen as just the "Boy-Who-Lived," oh, how that thirst of yours has grown from your first Sorting. Yes, I can see it, Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness; just as I said._

 _"No second thoughts? Well, then it better be—_ SLYTHERIN _!"_

The final word was shouted into the room and it rang throughout the silence of the Great Hall even as Harry took the Hat off his head. The silence was nearly deafening though the stillness of everyone's magic was even more so. It made Harry feel as if someone had put a blocker on his magic, but the thrum of the old magic in the Sorting Hat and the magic in the stones below his feet told him otherwise. Everyone was shell-shocked, but it only lasted a moment until the Slytherins began to clap louder than they had for any other student and a roar of giddy magic sung through the air. Theo was looking at him with a smirk twisting up the corner of his lips and Harry allowed a small smile to crawl across his face.

He handed the Sorting Hat to a surprised McGonagall and headed towards the empty seat next to Theo. Walking confidently towards his new House and now dressed in green and silver robes, Harry's eyes flickered to take in the expressions of his new Housemates. Many of them held expressions of unadulterated glee, no doubt at the fact that the _Boy-Who-Lived_ was in their House. Some of them were surprised, though they'd hidden it carefully, and others had frowns on their faces and were looking at him with sharp, calculating eyes. Harry took a mental image of those particular people and made a mental note of those whose names he knew. He had a feeling that these were going to be the people he would have to look out for in the future.

Harry ignored the eyes on him as he sat next to Theo and he nodded to Ron when he was Sorted into Gryffindor (who looked at him with a shrug, though he did seem a bit disappointed) and clapped for Blaise Zabini when he was Sorted into Slytherin. Blaise sat across from him and Theo next to Draco, who grinned. Apparently, the two were good friends, or at least they would be from what Harry recalled from some of the conversations he'd had with the Malfoy heir Before.

The hush of whispers that had permeated the Hall, most of which seemed to be aimed at him, faded when Dumbledore got to his feet. The man was beaming at the students with his arms open wide, the stars sparkling on his dark blue robes. Something in Harry eased at the sight of the man alive and he steadily ignored the memories of the green light racing toward him and him falling over the railing of the Astronomy Tower. This brought Snape to mind—who he could just about see out of the corner of his eye—whom he steadily ignored with the help of Dumbledore's speech, which he had just started.

"Welcome!" Dumbledore called out to the students. "Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you!" He then sat back down while everyone clapped and cheered, though the Slytherins around him did so politely, unlike the Gryffindors who were doing it as boisterously as they could. Though, that could be due to the food that had appeared in front of them. The Gryffindors were a particularly foody bunch.

"He's barmy," someone near him sneered and Harry turned to Pansy Parkinson, who didn't look as pug-like as his younger self had thought her as. In fact, all she had was a slightly upturned nose, nothing like the pug face he'd thought Before.

"My father says he mad," Draco drawled. Harry hid a smirk at the very Draco-like comment.

Everyone was plating themselves food and Harry looked over the selection before him. The food was Hogwarts food, no doubt about that, but it was more refined than what he remembered eating as a Gryffindor. Instead of fatty foods like potatoes and gravy and pork chops and sausages, there was grilled chicken and fish, medium-rare steaks, pasta, salad, numerous types of vegetables (not just potatoes), and Yorkshire Pudding, which was something that was shared between both Houses.

Harry wasn't feeling particularly hungry since he'd snacked during the train ride, but a raised brow from Theo had him plating himself some chicken, Yorkshire pudding, and vegetables. Instead of pumpkin juice like most of his classmates were drinking, Harry chose a glass of water. His stomach was churning a bit in a mixture of excitement, relief, and nerves and he felt that he wouldn't be able to stomach the acidic taste of it.

Theo was eating silently beside him, though his shrewd eyes were taking in the conversations around him. Down the table, Tracey Davis and Daphne Greengrass were whispering to one another, occasionally sending glances his way. The Slytherins closest to him were doing something similar, though their glances were much more hidden. If there was something that Harry knew about Slytherins more than anyone else, it was that they excelled at masks. And he wasn't talking about them putting on blank, stony expressions, either. Those were obvious.

No, he was talking about the front they put up. Some, like Theo, appeared indifferent and cool and collected, while others were friendly and grinned often. Others put on prissy attitudes like Draco and Pansy, though Harry felt like Draco only did so to copy his parents while the prissiness was all Parkinson, and others were genuinely easygoing and even boisterous—like Blaise, for example.

He was joking around with Draco and kept telling jokes to Crabbe and Goyle, trying to get them to do something other than grunt, Harry assumed. There were small, hidden smiles on their faces, though, which clued Harry into the fact that there was more to the two than he'd originally thought. Apparently, they _liked_ appearing nothing like an unintelligent grunt. That was their mask, he assumed. Harry felt that he should keep an eye on them. Maybe they were worth more than he'd originally assumed.

"Crabbe and Goyle are more intelligent than I thought," Harry murmured his thoughts to Theo, who smirked around a bite of grilled fish.

"It took me longer than it should have to realize," Theo admitted after swallowing, though his eyes examined the two boys shrewdly. "As vassals, they are required to follow Malfoy around and he used their bulk to his advantage Before. In the common room, though, they were allowed to be on their own. I didn't share a room with them, so I didn't know what they did when they were in there, but I caught Goyle reading a book on Ancient Greek history in the House's study room and Crabbe liked to sit by the windows and sketch."

Harry was ashamed to say that he was a bit surprised. Crabbe didn't really look like the artistic type, though he supposed that was for a reason. The info on Goyle was interesting, though, and Harry eyed him as he assessed his use. If Goyle was so interested in Ancient Greek history and knew a lot about it, Harry wondered if he knew of any Ancient Greeks who were interested in time travel. The ritual had been in Ancient Egyptian, yes, but that didn't mean that the Greeks and the Egyptians never interacted. What if there was a Greek witch or wizard who collected Egyptian rituals and spells? He would have to see about that later.

As he took another bite of his food, Harry felt eyes on him. He glanced up and blinked at Zabini, who was eyeing him curiously.

Harry swallowed his bite and said, "I'm Harry Potter." Zabini let out a warm, loud laugh that grabbed peoples' attention and that easy-going attitude of Zabini's made Harry smile slightly despite his nerves.

"You don't have to introduce yourself, everyone knows your name," said Zabini with a slight Italian accent.

"I hadn't realized," Harry said dryly, much to Zabini's amusement. "It's not like I'm famous or anything."

"Blaise Zabini," Zabini introduced himself with an amused grin, holding his hand out for Harry's. Harry set down his fork and wiped his hand off before setting his much smaller hand in Zabini's larger one. He brooded for a moment at the size difference, but Blaise had always been a pretty big guy on Ron's level of large, so he supposed he shouldn't be too upset. Didn't mean that he liked being so small again, though. It made him feel weak.

"Nice to meet you, Zabini," said Harry, employing the use of etiquette where you only use someone's last name unless they gave it to you. It was something that Harry had done sometimes in the past and Theo had touched on it a bit when they'd gone over etiquette. Apparently, Petunia's lessons in etiquette were "adequate" but she hadn't touched on the social niceties of British wizarding purebloods for some reason.

"Back at you, Potter."

This started off a round of introductions and Harry shared handshakes with those closest to him and nods to those he couldn't reach. No one introduced themselves to each other, just to him, and Harry commented, "You all know one another, don't you?"

Draco took the lead, nodding. "All of the old pureblood families know each other," he said. "Our families used to set up 'play dates' for us to get to know each other."

Harry raised a brow. "Play dates?"

"Oh, you know," Zabini jumped in with a conspiratorial grin, "When our parents met up with each other and left all of us to posture and brag about how pure our blood it, how old our bloodlines are, how deep our parents' pockets are. There's also trying to impress the other heirs and heiresses for marriage contracts."

"I am suddenly appreciative of my upbringing," said Harry, blinking at the blatant statement. He wasn't surprised too much, though. He would rather attend play dates with all the other rich kids if that meant having his parents and Sirius alive.

"What upbringing is that, by the way?" said Greengrass, who hadn't deigned to speak to Harry much other than a cool uttered, "Daphne Greengrass" and a handshake. "No one's seen you in public since that night." Her eyes were curious but almost calculating, and out of the corners of his eyes, Harry spotted the elder students lean towards him, having no doubt been listening in on his conversation and were currently eager to hear where the last living Potter had been squirrelled away and how he'd been raised.

Harry's eyes locked onto hers with a startling intensity at the mention of his parents. His magic coiled tightly beneath his skin at the perceived threat and he took in a slow, undetected breath in an attempt to cool down. He was acting irrationally, he knew. He'd stopped reacting to taunts and mentions of his parents long before he'd gone to Hogwarts (save for Marge, who's an all-around bitch and had no reason to comment on his parents since she didn't even know them, plus the fact that Harry's magic had been fluctuating due to puberty which led to his accidental magic), so why was be being so upset about it now?

"I've been with relatives," he said cooly to the Greengrass heiress with a wane smile, shutting her down before she could prod further.

The conversation died a little bit at his clipped comment, and sensing his irritation with her, Greengrass turned back to Davis, who she'd been talking to earlier. Theo nudged Harry's foot and lifted a brow, silently asking if he was alright, before nodding imperceptibly towards his partially eaten plate. Harry rolled his eyes slightly before nodding and taking a bite of his chicken. He chewed it slowly and tried to ignore how it was unappetizing it suddenly was before swallowing. A grimace of sorts threatened to spread across his face but he ignored it. He'd spoiled his appetite on the train with candy, and while he had been somewhat hungry for a proper meal, the mention of "that night" brought his appetite to a complete halt. He wasn't hungry and that bite of chicken settled heavily in his stomach.

"You are not hungry?" a raspy sort of voice said from right beside Harry, making him jolt slightly in surprise as he hadn't felt anyone approach him (though he had to admit silently to himself that he'd been a bit distracted). He blinked up at the Bloody Baron, whose pearly robes were shining with silver blood and whose shackles of penance clinked together ominously as he drifted another inch towards Harry.

Harry smiled at the Bloody Baron wanly. "I ate a lot on the train," he told the ghost. He didn't bother asking if the ghost was hungry as he remembered that horrible Halloween he spent on Nearly Headless Nick's Death Day that he wouldn't be attending next year.

The Baron merely hummed, blank eyes and gaunt expression staring at Harry with an odd sort of intensity that had the hair on his arms raising and his magic buzzing slightly beneath his skin. Harry knew that the ghost had seen through his statement though he didn't particularly care at the moment. Instead of saying anything, the Baron merely drifted back a few feet to watch the feast with that deadened expression of his.

Across from him, Draco shuddered slightly. "The ghosts are creepy," he said. Beside him, Zabini laughed slightly.

"Too true! There's an old Zabini relative who haunts one of our vacation villas. She's always popping in through the bathroom walls when I'm showering, which I wouldn't mind if she had been a sixth or seventh year when she died," said Zabini with a waggle of his eyebrows, his dark eyes glancing over at one of the bustier seventh years down the bench, "but she's a _vecchia_!"

Though Harry wasn't as knowledgable about Italian as he was about say Latin or Greek, the context clues alone drew a not-so-pretty picture.

"There's an old lady haunting your bathroom while you _shower_?" Harry said with a disgusted expression. That reminded him too much of the memory of Moaning Myrtle who, while she had been around thirteen or fourteen when she died, had watched him bathe. Harry was unsure which was more unappealing to have watch him bathe; an old crone or a perpetual pubescent teenage girl.

Zabini let out a bark of laughter. "You know Italian?" he asked in amusement, the accent dripping off his tongue in exaggeration. The accent was pleasing to the ears and Harry swore he could see some of the second or third years down the bench from him blush at it, but he ignored it since Zabini was a decade younger than him in mental age.

"Not much," he admitted, "but I'm familiar with Romance languages."

"If you know Latin you will do well in class. Most of our spells are in Latin," Zabini commented, to which Harry nodded at, before Zabini's attention switched to the plates of dessert which appeared. "Oh! They have gelato!" As there had been a lull in eating for the previous few minutes, the dishes suddenly switched from savoury to sweet, with a bowl of gelato popping up in front of Zabini.

Harry huffed out an amused breath, and even though he had inhaled an unhealthy amount of sweets on the train, he plated himself a small slice of treacle tart. He would have gotten a much larger one, but his stomach was starting to protest a bit, which Harry ignored in favour of getting a slice of his favourite sweet. He'd missed Hogwarts' treacle tart.

Beside him, Theo was eating a similarly-sized piece of trifle. He picked at it more than he ate it, however, with slightly blank eyes, Harry nudged his friend's foot with his own. Theo's usually sharp blue eyes blinked over at him, clearing away some of the cloudiness, and Harry offered a soft and subtle smile, to which Theo ducked his head slightly at. Harry had known that he wouldn't be the only one dealing with ghosts of the past at Hogwarts—Theo had gone to Hogwarts while Death Eaters had been in charge, the kind of Death Eaters that had forced children to perform Unforgivables on one another—but he found himself floundering with how to help Theo. He couldn't offer soothing words nor much physical comfort with all of the ears and eyes on him, so he just kept his knee and leg pressed against Theo's, hoping that it would help ground his friend, who was still staring down at his plate somewhat blankly.

Harry was feeling weighed down and sleepy by the time the last of the desserts disappeared and Dumbledore stood again.

“Ahem—just a few more words now that we are all fed and watered. I have a few start-of-term notices to give you," the headmaster said. “First years should note that the forest on the grounds is forbidden to all pupils. And a few of our older students would do well to remember that as well.” Dumbledore’s blue eyes, which were shining behind his half-moon glasses that were perched on his crooked nose—a gift from Aberforth Dumbledore, he now knew—flashed off to the side. Harry knew immediately he was glancing at the rumbunctious Weasley twins but he couldn't bring himself to look in their direction. “I have also been asked by Mr Filch, the caretaker, to remind you all that no magic should be used between classes in the corridors.

“Quidditch trials will be held in the second week of the term. Anyone interested in playing for their House teams should contact Madam Hooch. And finally, I must tell you that this year, the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to everyone who does not wish to die a very painful death.”

This time, Harry did not laugh. He knew what awaited in the third-floor corridor and he asked himself, not for the first time, what the hell did Dumbledore think he was doing? He'd worked with children for _decades_ , didn't he knew how they worked? You don't just tell someone to not eat the forbidden fruit and then expect them not to eat it! Or hell, not even give them a reason, at least! Harry bet that no one would've thought about the corridor if Dumbledore had said that it was under repairs and was dangerous to go into.

Harry felt Theo's leg twitch from where his was pressed against his and Harry glanced over at his friend, who was sporting a slight frown. Around them, Harry could hear more than a few of the Slytherins wondering what lurked in the forbidden corridor and whether it was worth the warning to find out. He felt uneasy at the thought that all of these students were thinking of walking so close to danger but there was nothing he could do about it without having suspicions cast on him.

“And now, before we go to bed, let us sing the school song!” cried Dumbledore, cutting off all of the whispers. Harry noticed, with some amusement, that the teachers’ smiles had become fixed. Dumbledore gave his wand, the Elder wand, a little flick, and a long golden ribbon flew out of it, which rose high above the tables and twisted itself, snakelike, into words. Harry eyed the spellwork with curiosity. The spell was so much like the flame words that Tom Riddle had used and Harry wondered if this spell had sparks Tom's curiosity in it. _He_ was curious in it, at least, and he wondered how similar it was to _flagrate_.

“Everyone pick their favourite tune,” continued Dumbledore, breaking him out of his thoughts on fiddling with spellwork, “and off we go!”

The whole school, even the Slytherins, Harry noted, sang along to the words that the ribbon formed. The Weasley twins, like Harry remembered with a bout of fondness, heartache, and hilarity, finished last with the funeral march version. (He steadfastly ignored how the words seemed to foreshadow Hogwarts's death at the hands of the Death Eaters. _It had felt so cold and dead, then, if he thought back on it, like all of the happiness from years of children's joy had been sucked out._ )

“Ah, music," said Dumbledore, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here! And now, bedtime. Off you trot!”

Obediently, all of the Houses stood to leave the Hall, and Harry followed the rest of the Slytherins down to the dungeons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think about the chapter and ask any questions you've got! Also, let me hear your thoughts on whether or not I should add this chapter to the end of the previous one.


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